No, Plecker was not around in 1857, but the laws that he began espousing in the early 1900s were already in place. Sorry, I did not mean to muddy the waters. Here is some information on racial purity and American policy. Laws forbidding marriage between people of different races were common in America from the Colonial period through the middle of the 20th century. In the very early days of Colonial America there was not much thought of races, only survival. By around 1662, racial laws began to appear. Then by the late 1700s, early 1800s laws and ideas began to enlarge upon those already in place. By 1915, twenty-eight states made marriages between "Negroes and white persons" invalid; six states included this prohibition in their constitutions. These laws also forbid other things for 'negroes,' including owning property, voting, schooling their children with 'white' children as schooling became available. Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 stands out among anti-miscegenation laws that can be traced to eugenic advocacy. We do have to remember that this was a sign of the times, but these eugenic ideas are a shame and a disgrace to America and particularly to Virginia. To fashion a successful legislative strategy, three local Virginia eugenicists – John Powell, Earnest Cox and Walter Plecker – consulted with Madison Grant and Harry Laughlin. Powell, a celebrated pianist and composer, was the founder of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, an elitist version of the Ku Klux Klan dedicated to maintaining "Anglo-Saxon ideals and civilization in America." Like The Passing of the Great Race, Cox's book White America emphasized white supremacy and the dangers of racial mixing. Plecker was registrar at the Bureau of Vital Statistics of the Virginia Board of Health. His ideas on racial interbreeding as the source of "public health" problems appeared in state-published pamphlets distributed to all who planned to marry. These phamphlets are available to be read today via the state archives of Virginia. They make your skin crawl. When The Racial Integrity Act became law, it included provisions requiring racial registration certificates and strict definitions of who would qualify as members of the white race. It emphasized the "scientific" basis of race assessment, and the "dysgenic" dangers of race mixing. Its major provision declared: "It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian. …the term "white person" shall apply only to such person as has no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons…." It is interesting to note that at least 16 members of the Virginia General Assembly who claimed to be descendants of Pocahontas objected to the first draft of the law they proposed, because it defined as "non-white" anyone with 1/64 of American Indian ancestry. Alabama and Georgia eventually copied the Virginia law. Within a decade, similar laws prohibiting inter-ethnic marriages and attempting to sort citizens by percentage of Jewish "blood" were adopted by the government of Nazi Germany. Walter Ashby Plecker was unassuming in appearance: a small-town doctor whose penchant for number-crunching earned him the position of registrar in Virginias Bureau of Vital Statistics in 1912. But appearances were indeed deceiving. With Plecker at the helm, the bureau went on an all-out war against "amalgamation". Plecker was not the author of the Racial Integrity Law of 1924--Virginia's infamous "one drop" statute, which created two racial categories, "pure" white and everybody else. But he--and allies such as John Powell of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America--pushed hard to enforce the act's provision for "ancestral registration". Virginians shied away from compliance in that area, according to J. David Smith in The Eugenic Assault on America: Scenes in Red, White, and Black. Indeed, "passing" might have been commonplace among whiter-skinned African- Americans since at least 1662, when the first anti-miscegenation laws were passed in Virginia, but even for allegedly "pure" whites, proof of racial purity might have been difficult to obtain. But Plecker's power to grant birth, death, and marriage certificates gave him unprecedented and awesome powers over Virginians who had less clout than the Pocahontas contingent. With the stroke of a pen, Plecker could write an individual into "Negro" status--and legal and social oblivion. Plecker was only too willing to exercise that power, thus making him a figure of dread to Indians in general, but particularly to the Powhatan remnants in Rockbridge and Amherst counties, until his retirement and subsequent death in 1946. He was forced to retire after WWII because it was thought that he might be tried at Nuremberg. Some time later, crossing Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA where he lived, Plecker was run over by a truck and killed. According to Helen Rountree, a Old Dominion University professor who has written extensively on Virginia's Powhatan tribes, Plecker believed that all Indians had "polluted" their blood by mingling it with free African-Americans--or "free issues", in the local vernacular. Plecker thus saw those who claimed Indian ancestry as opportunists seeking what Rountree called a "way station to whiteness"-- in other words, he saw all Indians as blacks attempting to "pass." Plecker intimidated mid-wives, wrote threatening pamphlets, editorialized in newspapers, and trained an entire generation of county clerks and health service workers in his methods. When all else failed, he simply changed records to suit his prejudices, striking out the designation "Indian" and replacing it with "Negro" or "colored" or "mulatto"--or writing notations on the back. Hope this is helpful. NancyS THE MELUNGEON HEALTH EDUCATION AND SUPPORT NETWORK: http://www.melungeonhealth.org SPARKS Genealogy: http://SparksGenealogy.net