MG-

From the website LIVE JOURNAL:

"From what I've looked up about Melungians, the genetic testing all indicates some European and African ancestry, along with Native American. They usually had English surnames, esp. Collins. Even in the 1700s the Melungians were referred to as "Tri-Racial" and if you ask the people themselves, they claimed to be "Portygeese." There are genetic connections a group in Turkey, which happens to also have the skull ridge. Portugal was part of the Turkish Empire until the late 1400s, and so was all of Northern Africa. There would have been a lot of genetic mixing throughout the entire empire--lots of folks, mostly soldiers and merchants, travelled the length and breadth of the empire on a regular basis. So the claim to being Portuguese is possible, even likely. There were scattered Portuguese immigrations all during the 1700s, but the Melungians seem to have been well established in westernmost Virginia and East Tennessee before 1700.

Most likely, the Melungians are descended from immigrants who landed in Spanish territory (St. Augustine, Florida was founded by Spain in 1565--that's 42 years before Jamestown) who intermarried with the Cherokee before English Colonists ever came into the area. If the Spanish kept records of immigration, I bet nobody's bothered to check, however, complete recordkeeping would have been impossible what with all the indians and pirates running around, mostly ignoring bureaucracy. It's pretty easy to imagine a couple of families from Saint Augustine marrying local and ending up in East Tennessee (it's only 589 highway miles away from Knoxville), and nobody think there was anything weird about it for 3 or 4 generations."

This is not necessarily a statement from someone with professional credentials but it may be a lead.

Charley Noble