Thursday, February 23, 2012

Fugates of Kentucky: Skin Bluer than Lake Louise

Via Billy

Benjamin "Benjy" Stacy so frightened maternity doctors with the color of his skin -- "as Blue as Lake Louise" -- that he was rushed just hours after his birth in 1975 to University of Kentucky Medical Center.

As a transfusion was being readied, the baby's grandmother suggested to doctors that he looked like the "blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek." Relatives described the boy's great-grandmother Luna Fugate as "blue all over," and "the bluest woman I ever saw."

In an unusual story that involves both genetics and geography, an entire family from isolated Appalachia was tinged blue. Their ancestral line began six generations earlier with a French orphan, Martin Fugate, who settled in Eastern Kentucky.

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2 comments:

  1. Interesting.

    Up by Lufkin, Tx on the Angelina River, there was a family known as the bird family. They were from way back on the river, like come to town twice a year.

    They had inbred & intermarried some much that their heads had taken a bird like appearance.

    I first heard about them while taking night classes in my sociology class.

    A little different than the Fugates, but similar circumstances.

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