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Who are the Melungeons? Unfortunately, there is no clear answer. It is a topic about which there are many theories, many viewpoints, and many strong opinions, but no general consensus. In broadest terms, it can be said that "Melungeon" refers to a mixed race people living in the southern Appalachian mountains. This area includes WV, western VA, eastern KY, TN, parts of NC and SC, and northern GA and AL. They are related in many ways to other mixed race groups such as the Lumbees, Brass Ankles, Redbones, Jackson Whites, and Wesorts. Melungeons are commonly referred to as a "tri-racial isolate," meaning that they are a distinct group of people having white European, Native American, and African American blood in varying percentages. Another popular belief is that the Melungeons are the descendants of Portuguese and/or Turkish sailors shipwrecked in the early years of the European New World. This theory seems to have its basis in the accounts of seventeenth-century European settlers who encountered groups of people with dark skin and occasional light hair and eyes who lived in the mountain fastnesses of VA, spoke a broken Elizabethan English, and called themselves "Portyghee." Others claim these accounts lend support to the idea that the Melungeons are the descendants of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, VA, who survived through absorption into the native peoples. Support of the Portuguese origins theory has also been seen in the incidence of diseases and disorders associated specifically with the Mediterranean region in those claiming Melungeon heritage. Further exploration of this phenomenon is currently being undertaken in the field of genetics.

The truth about the Melungeons becomes no less shifting and ill-defined as people attempt to trace their familial roots. Those who are fortunate enough to find their ancestors in census records are often puzzled by the way their families are recorded as "white" in one census and "colored" in the next. (Prior to the Civil War, the term "colored" did not refer solely to African Americans, but also to Native Americans and those of mixed race.) Some find their ancestors in the many Indian census rolls, others are found in lists of "free people of color." People may have heard from old-timers that their family was "Black Dutch" or "Black Irish." They may look at pictures and think that some of their ancestors somehow didn't look "white," even though they "passed" and lived in white society. Many people have an "Indian grandmother" story.

I first became interested in the Melungeons a short while ago when I heard the "Indian grandmother" story about my own family. Oral tradition maintains that my mother's paternal ancestors were Native American. My great-grandmother was supposed to have had an Indian census number, some were supposed to have lived on a reservation, and the Native blood was supposed to come through several branches of the family. Initial searches through the Indian census records failed to turn up my great-grandmother and one branch of the family is curiously untraceable in the US census records. It was out of this frustration that I first discovered some information on the Melungeons. The accounts I read rang true with the experiences I was having and the stories I'd been told. There is a list of surnames commonly associated with people of so-called Melungeon ancestry, and on it I found most of the surnames associated with the main trunk line of my ancestors in question. That also seemed to explain the dark coloring of some of my family members and the fact that some have vitiligo, a loss of skin pigmentation common in Native and African Americans. My mother has been diagnosed with Thalassemia minor, and one of my cousins has Familial Mediterranean Fever, two illnesses associated primarily with those of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and Sephardic Jewish heritage. I also thought back to something a great-aunt had said about my great-grandmother's people being "light Indians," a term that would seem to typify many Melungeons. Once I started looking at my ancestors from a different perspective, I noticed some other things such as a Black Dutch tradition associated with one of my ancestral families. I still don't have any answers, but feel increasingly confident that many of them will lie in the shrouded history of those called "Melungeon."

Some common Melungeon surnames and suspected Melungeon families in my ancestral lines: Ashworth, Green, Cordle/Caudle/Caudill, Taliaferro, Turley, Vice/Vise, Allen, James, Roan, Fountain, and Crump. There is some compelling evidence that those in the Taliaferro lineage were originally Sephardic Jews.