In 1820, in a small settlement just outside of the US city Hazard, a place called Troublesome Creek, two people Martin Fugate and Elizabeth Smith married and started their own family. The couple contrasted each other with Elizabeth a fair woman with striking red hair but Martin was an indigo colour and was different to other men in the area.
The blue colour in his skin did not put his wife off him and they started their family. The Fugates had seven children between them and four of the children inherited the blue skin of their father. Despite the colour of their skin being a blue/purple colour all the children were healthy children. So what was the reason behind their skin colour?
Why were they blue?
The skin colour changed due to a rare genetic disease that Martin had called methemoglobinemia and this gave the skin the tinge of blue. Unbeknown to the Fugates was that Martin was not the only carrier of the gene but Elizabeth was also a carrier of it. The odds are huge, not like deciding how to choose a broker, that Martin would fall for a woman who had just one gene the same as his that would cause over half of their children to have blue skin. Elizabeth did not show any changes to the colour of her skin because her gene was recessive.
Despite the children being healthy and experiencing no medical issues, they were embarrassed because of their blue skin and were essentially exiled from the town and forced to live in isolation. This in itself caused complications because methemoglobinemia is a product of inbreeding.
With the lack of connection to the further world or even the closest city, the Fugates turned to inbreeding as there was not many alternatives. The Fugates married other Fugate cousins and families who lived nearby, with names like Combs, Smith, Ritchie and Stacy. Zacahriah, the son of Martin and Elizabeth, ended up marrying his aunt and having children with her. This interbreeding led the gene to become more progressive and affect further generations.
Other blue cases
However, there has been cases of people with the genetic disease in society today and they are believed to have descended from the Fugates. In the 1970s, a child called Benjamin Stacy had problems at birth but was born with the same blue skin despite the Fugates not being prominent anymore. However, Stacy was actually a distant relative of Martin and Elizabeth, in fact he was the great-great-great-great-grandson of the pair.
Benjamin, did eventually grow out of his blue colour and it disappeared altogether because he only had one of the genes but he would still go blue in the fingernails or his lips if he was cold or angry. Benjamin had descended through the Stacy side as one of Martin and Elizabeth’s sons, Levy, married a Ritchie girl and had eight children, one of them Luna. Luna married John E. Stacy and they had a whopping thirteenchildren.
How did the Fugates genetic misfortune eventually disappear?
Well in 1912, the USA area became a coal mining place, andthat meant more connection to the outside world with train lines being built and more people coming to the area for work. This led to the Fugates also leaving the area of Kentucky and settling elsewhere. It eradicated anymore inbreeding or breeding with other families in the vicinity which was close essentially inbreeding as well.
However, many people like Stacy and Green, are still feeling the effects of the close inbreeding of the families stated earlier. Although there have been cases of people turning blue through being exposed to too much silver, none are more interesting than the rare meeting of Martin and Elizabeth who created a blue family.
