Melungeon ( m@-LUN-j@n) is a term traditionally applied to one of numerous "tri-racial isolate" groups of the Southeastern United States. Historically, Melungeons were associated with the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia, which includes portions of East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and eastern Kentucky. Tri-racial describes populations thought to be of mixed European, African and Native American ancestry. Although there is no consensus on how many such groups exist, estimates range as high as 200.

According to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, which Virginia incorporated into law in 1662, children were assigned the social status and ethnicity of their mother, regardless of their father's ethnicity or citizenship. This meant the children of African slave mothers were born into slavery. But it also meant the children of free white or mulatto women, even if fathered by enslaved African men, were born free. The free descendants of such unions formed many of the oldest free families of color. Early colonial Virginia was very much a "melting pot" of peoples, and some of these early multiracial families were ancestors of the later Melungeons. Each family line has to be traced separately. Over the generations, most individuals of the group called Melungeon were persons of mixed European and African descent, whose ancestors had been free in colonial Virginia.  Edward Price's dissertation on Mixed-Blood Populations of the Eastern United States as to Origins, Localizations, and Persistence (1950) stated that children of European and free black unions had intermarried with persons of Native American ancestry. These conclusions have been largely upheld in subsequent scholarly and genealogical studies. In 1894, the U.S. Department of the Interior, in its "Report of Indians Taxed and Not Taxed," noted that the Melungeons in Hawkins County "claim to be Cherokee of mixed blood". The term Melungeon has since sometimes been applied as a catch-all phrase for a number of groups of mixed-race ancestry.  In 2012, the genealogist Roberta Estes and her fellow researchers reported that the Melungeon lines likely originated in the unions of black and white indentured servants living in Virginia in the mid-1600s before slavery became widespread. They concluded that as laws were put in place to prevent the mixing of races, the family groups could only intermarry with each other. They migrated together from western Virginia through the Piedmont frontier of North Carolina, before settling primarily in the mountains of East Tennessee.

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