Blue People?

...Of Kentucky

“Jeee…zus loves the little chilll…drenn.. All the chilll…drenn of the world; Red, brown, yellow, black and blue; he loves them cause his Daddy told him to”  ...  Is that the way you remember that little song? It was as likely as not to be commonplace during your youth?   Well, that’s not exactly how it went!

But if you were raised in Kentucky (especially in southeastern), you may have wondered why the song didn’t say something like that because you were well aware of the fact that there were blue people; and that was long before the advent of the Smurf’s.  In fact the “blue’s” that I’m speaking of were real folks and a few of the ones I knew about during the 1950’s and 1960’s lived in the community known as Lick Branch of Ball Creek in Perry County, Kentucky, only a few miles below the place I was raised and not far above the larger Creek that’s still called Troublesome.

About seven generations after a Frenchman (it’s said he came from a small town called Pickard) named Joshiah Fugate setup house keeping with his wife (Mary Martin) on the banks of eastern Kentucky's Troublesome Creek, Mary gave birth to a son a few years later who they named Martin.  Some years later he married a redheaded bride and as was tradition they elected to stay and live in the Troublesome Creek area. Many years later his great-great-great great grandson (Benjamin Stacy) was born in a hospital just a few hundred yards from the creek bank of Troublesome.

The boy inherited from his father, gangly like features, and a slight nasal way of speaking from his mother.

What he got from Joshiah Fugate was dark blue skin. "It was almost purple," his father recollects.

The doctors were so dumbfounded by the color of Benjamin Stacy's skin that they quickly transferred him by ambulance to a medical clinic in Lexington. After two days of testing there was no explanation for his skin blue colored skin.

The Lexington doctors had decided to try a blood transfusion to see if that would help, when Benjamin's grandmother spoke up. "Have you ever heard of the blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek?" she asked the doctors.  She went on to say: "My grandmother Luna on my dad's side was a blue Fugate. It was real bad in her."

Alva Stacy, the boy's father, later explained: "The doctors finally came to the conclusion that Benjamin's color was due to blood inherited from generations back."

It turned out that Benjamin’s blue skin tint just went away within just a few weeks, and he became about as normal a looking boy as you could find anywhere.  But his lips and fingernails continued to turn a shade of purple-blue each time that he got cold or angry.

Dark blue lips and fingernails are the only obvious traces of Joshiah Fugate's legacy that’s left; it has been determined that he most likely carried a recessive gene that has resulted in shading many of the Fugates and their kin folk blue for nearly 200 years.

There has been much speculation up and down the hollows about what made the blue people blue; some say heart disease, a lung disorder, or as one old-timer explained the condition: "their blood is just a little closer to their skin."

A hematologist from the University of Kentucky by the name of Madison Cawein first heard rumors about the blue people when he went to work at the University of Kentucky's Lexington medical clinic in 1960.  As a result he traveled to Hazard, Kentucky (the local county seat and the largest town in the area) in the late 1960’s to try and learn more.  The American Heart Association had a clinic in Hazard at the time, and there Cawein met "a great big nurse" who offered to help.  Her name was Ruth Pendergrass; and yes she gave me many a shot throughout my grade school days, and yes she was a very large woman.

Miss Pendergrass had been trying to promote an interest in the medical community regarding blue people since a few years earlier, a dark blue woman had walked into the county health department one cold winter afternoon and asked for a blood test…"She had been out in the cold and she was just blue!" recalled Pendergrass.  “She told me that her family was the blue Combs’ who lived up on Ball Creek and that she was a sister to one of the Fugate women."

To make a really long story short, after several years of investigating numerous blue people in the area, including Ritchie’s, Combs’s, Stacy’s, and Fugates; Dr. Cawein finally determined that the condition was caused by an extremely rare condition of possessing two recessive genes that can only be passed on to another by your biological father and mother.

Here’s the simplified version of it: If only your father (for e.g.) carries this particular gene it is passed on to his sons and daughters with no disquieting effects at all. … But in the rare event that your father and your mother both carry the notorious “blue” gene then you wind up with two (2); one from each of your parents, when this happens, there is a pretty good chance (1 in 4) that you will be blue.

Some self professed Fugate “family tree” specialists argue that Martin Fugate of the 1780’s era and described here as being one of Joshiah Fugates son’s was himself blue.  But there is no written record of it.  However there is written record that at least 3 of his 7 children were blue.

So I expect that it’s a mystery which set of parents: Joshiah & wife, Mary Martin or perhaps Martin Fugate and his wife Mary Elizabeth Smith (it doesn’t help that both mothers had the same first name) that the blue people syndrome originated with; but it’s not hard to figure out where Martin’s first name came from, but that doesn’t help figure the source a bit.

Regardless, the odds against it are so high that they are said to be incalculable, but Martin (or Joshiah) Fugate managed to find and marry a woman who carried the same recessive gene which created a long line of blue people.

By the way, the medical name given to the condition is methemoglobinemia.

Sources…                                                http://rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kyperry3/Blue_Fugates_Troublesome_Creek.html                                        My Fugate family genealogy records …                                    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methemoglobinemia                      http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1272/is-there-really-a-race-of-blue-people