Turning Blue: The Shocking Inbreeding Case of America’s Most Isolated Family

when we think of blue skin we immediately think of a medical emergency like maybe this person isn’t getting enough oxygen but for one family this was just the way that things were and no one even really questioned it for more than 100 years well hello there I’m Christina and you’re listening to history and heay Martin fug was born in France and migrated to the United States in the 1800s during that time the US government was in the business of offering land to anyone who would agree to Homestead so in 1820 Martin took advantage of one

such opportunity that took him to Troublesome Creek near Hazard Kentucky once establishing his Homestead Martin met and married Elizabeth Smith who was known for her very pale skin and fiery red hair it was said that her skin was as pale as the mountain laurel that blooms Every Spring around the Creek Hollow or as I would put it she looked like Casper the Friendly Ghost but when these two love birds had their first child he was born with blue skin now personally I feel like this would have been a huge shock but maybe it wasn’t

because the stories passed down through the generations say that Martin himself was blue and some stories even claim that this is why he was an orphan it wasn’t that his parents had passed away rather they had abandoned him because they didn’t know how to raise a son with blue skin which is really sad if it’s true and while there are no official records to confirm the stories of his childhood we do know that Martin and Elizabeth went on to have a total of seven children four of which had blue skin now it turns out that both Martin

and Elizabeth carried a rare recessive gene and this is what caused blue skin in four of their children but apparently in order for children to have blue skin both parents need to have this trait and it was just a huge coincidence that’s not likely to ever happen again like the chances are pretty slim that this would ever happen so that being the case you would probably think okay so this ended with Martin and Elizabeth’s children right well it would have ended there except that their son Zachariah married his maternal Aunt so if you’re not

tracking me here that means that Elizabeth’s own sister married her son you’re probably thinking ew and if you aren’t well you should be because you see the thing was the whole reason that area was called Troublesome Creek was because of just how hard the trail along the creek really was it was nearly impassible to the point that even experienced Hunters struggled to weave their way through the valley as large trees and Vines and stones and everything that were blocking the path so all of this meant that there weren’t

really many people coming and settling in that area and so other than the few gay Ates there were really only four other families that were settled there you had the Smiths the Coles the Stacy’s and the Richies so if you included the fug Gates you basically had five married couples who along with their children made up five families but being that the Smith family was blood related to Elizabeth that meant the F Gates and Smith’s children were already blood related and so this meant that the Fugate and the Smith children only had

three families who they could choose a spouse from they were way up in the Eastern Hills of Kentucky and they rarely ever saw Outsiders so needless to say the pool of people I’m not related to that are also single was pretty small and this led to the aforementioned in breeding so Zachariah and his aunt get married and they have eight children together and those children and their cousins continue to marry into the branches of the same family and since they kept mixing all their own jeans back together over and over again more

and more of them started to come out blue and it said that there were levels to the bless some of them had really pale blue skin almost like they were so white they were blue kind of thing then you had others that were a darker blue like a cobalt blue or even as dark as indigo blue over the years it said the family started to get more and more embarrassed of their skin in part because of on the rare occasion when someone knew would come to the area and see one of the blue fug Gates they would be incredibly shocked and this kind of

just gave the few Gates a complex about it to the point that even their own neighbors started seeing less and less of them and they really started isolating even more and only really associating with each other especially once their blue color started to be associated with inbreeding this led to even stronger amounts of inner marriage among the family and it wasn’t long before this family tree was really just a hole like it went straight up is that even how you say that so basically they’re all blue and things just go on like this for

almost 150 years without anyone really knowing why why are all of their kids coming out blue of course everyone always has an opinion on everything so there were plenty of theories some people thought that maybe their blood was too close to the skin people I don’t know what the deal as with people back in the old days they always had the most like basic explanation for things that just didn’t make any sense or maybe it was some sort of lung or heart disease which uh that actually makes a lot more sense but none of the theories really
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seemed to fit right because most of these blue people lived for like 80 even in 90 plus years so it didn’t seem like their skin color was really hurting anything other than making them the subject of vicious gossips and causing them to be shunned by the other Hill people who suspected that having blue skin must be an act of the devil which I feel like was another very common thing back in the olden days anything unusual or strange was definitely caused by the devil hence the reason they kept it themselves but surely it’s not just the
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inbreeding along that had caused this phenomenon I mean there’s a reason why jokes about inbreeding and Hill bellies have survived even to this day but we don’t see anyone else turning blue so in 1960 a young hematologist in the University of Kentucky named Madison Cohen began hearing rumors about these Blue Hill People was a very accomplished Doctor Who had done a lot in his career he helped to isolate the antidote for chalera and had helped to create a drug for Parkinson’s Disease but studying blood was his true passion so when he
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heard about these Blue Hill folks he was definitely intrigued there was also a n by the name of Ruth Pendergrass who was also interested in these blue people because she had done a blood test on a woman who had come into her clinic and Ruth had thought that the woman was definitely having a heart attack and about to die at any moment due to how blue the Hue of her skin was the blue woman on the other hand she seemed more surprised that Ruth hadn’t heard of her family and so she tells Ruth that her family was the blue comes who lived up
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on ball Creek and she was the sister of one of the Fugate women women so Ruth and Dr Cohen joined forces and began searching for these blue people they went on a Smurf hunt if you will but in order to get to where the Blue Hill people were Dr Cohen had to travel eight hours one way so he and nurse Ruth got discouraged whenever they weren’t able to actually find any of these blue people apparently they were still deep deep into these Hills there were a couple of times where they spotted a blue person but by the time they hiked
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up to where they were the person had already gone I mean honestly they might have scared them away from their excitement these people were used to being ostracized and I’m sure they would assume that anyone seeking them out for their skin color probably didn’t have the best of intentions so these two were getting pretty discouraged and probably about to give up when all of the sudden a pair of siblings Rachel and Patrick Richie walked into the Heart Clinic in Hazard they were blue and Dr Dr Cohen was excited he began charting the
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family’s history and found no evidence of heart disease at this point he began to suspect that their blue skin was caused by a rare condition known as methemoglobinemia wow I can’t believe I just said that a rare but toxic form of anemia that can occur based on many different factors now the most common factor would be abnormal hemoglobin in the blood however when Dr Cohen tested the siblings for abnormal hemoglobin the test results were negative so Dr Cohen turned to his medical literature to try to figure out this mystery and he came
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across a case of native alaskans who seem to resemble Kentucky blue people the researcher in the case of the alaskans had discovered that the methemoglobinemia that his patients had was based on an enzyme deficiency and that this condition can be passed down through recessive traits this led Dr Cohen down his path to discovering that the blue kuckian lacked the enzyme that helps process hemoglobin and keeps the blood from producing too much methal globin While most people have less than 1% methal globin in their blood the
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fugates likely carried a level of about 10 to 20% not enough to be harmful but too much to be able to have a normal standard skin color this abundance of blue meag globin overpowered the ability of the red hemoglobin to transport oxygen to the blood thus this had turned the Richies and their ancestors skin blue and their blood a chocolatey Brown so after all of his work at tracking the family and doing this research Dr Cohen determined that the enzyme deficiency had begun with Martin and Elizabeth fate over 150 years prior and had trickled
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down to many Hill folks due to inbreeding so it was basically just a huge coincidence that both Martin and Elizabeth had carried this recessive jeans and then passed it down to their descendants and as I mentioned earlier this would have probably stopped with their children and the blue people of Kentucky would have just been an old Hills people Legend if not for the IM breeding that had continued to pass the gene down through the generations fortunately for the 1960s blue people isolating the cause in abled Dr Cohen to
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come up with a treatment Dr Cohen was really excited to be able to help these people out because he could tell how embarrass the people really were to be blue this was likely due to the fact that they had been treated so differently by their neighbors because of the superstitions attached to having blue skin obviously Dr Cohen was a professional who didn’t buy into any of these superstitions and he treated the blue people with kindness so Dr Cohen gave the Richie siblings a methylene blue injection including faux enzyme and
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within minutes their skin began to turn to a natural pink color he then gave the siblings methylene blue and tablet form to take daily to maintain their skin tone and that was basically it take this pill for the rest of your life and you look totally normal I can’t even imagine the relief that they must have felt finding a cure I also think it’s amazing that they were brave enough to leave the hills and go get help so Dr Cohen like I said had followed the family tree and he contined to follow them a while after
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their treatments and over time he said that the recessive bless did seem to have faded throughout the family tree as modern advancements between 1910 and 1930 like the railroad and modern roads had led the Fugate descendants to start moving into neighboring towns and marrying people outside of their traditional circles so after Dr Cohen’s treatments in the 1960s it seemed as though the blue people had Diversified their Gene poles to the point that the bless was bred out out that is until 1975 when Benjamin Stacy was born and he
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was purple doctors of course immediately kind of flipped out and wanted to do blood transfusions but Benjamin’s grandmother remarked that the baby’s great grandmother Luna Fugate was known for having similar coloring Benji’s father Alva Stacy was a direct descendant of Martin Fugate Stacy’s family tree showed that he was in his own words kin to himself one of zachariah’s sons you know the original one who had married his aunt and calls all this meths him yeah his son Levy had married a girl from the Richie family
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and they had had eight children and Luna was one of their daughters Luna had gone on to marry John E Stacy which was Benjamin’s great-grandfather even though he was born with this bluish purple shade Benjamin’s skin actually ended up fading into a normal shade over time without any treatments and this was because he only carried one gene for methemoglobinemia so while the fug gates are some of the most famous there actually have been other blue people there was one case in Ireland where this woman noticed that her children were
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starting to get blue skin but if she would feed them cabbage they would turn back to their normal pinkish shade but if they hadn’t eaten cabbage in a while their skin would turn blue so she just fed her kids a lot of cabbage and that was the end of that but most cases of blue people are due to outside factors like exposures to a certain chemical like in the case of Paul Carson who turned his skin Blue by consuming and rubbing his skin with colloidal silver compounds in order to self- treat various skin conditions now over the
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years it has been suspected that some Americans who inherited the methemoglobinemia gene may have been descendants of the fug Gates but searches for direct links have proved inconclusive thank you guys so much for listening to today’s episode I hope that you enjoyed it learned something new and until next time I’ll catch you right here in the next [Music] one I want to eat something okay I’m almost done and the the plants in our house um they’re dying they need water okay now they have they have plenty of water just wait for a few minutes can I