Michele, There are some sites on the Internet which give quite a bit of information about the Melungeons. According to what I have read the people were a mixture of several different nationalities and even different races, including Indian, Negro and whites from different backgrounds. I believe this is why you find different members of the same family listed in different ways, even though their heritage is the same. It seems, also, that how they are listed may depend on the individual who was writing about the person, whether a census, marriage record or what. Of course in North Carolina, for instance, a white could not marry into another race until not too many years ago. A friend has been tracing an ancestor whose mother was Indian, and the father white, yet he passed for white at least twice in the marriage records in North Carolina, but on census he might be shown as mulatto! People of mixed race often tried to pass him/herself off as white, and I read that this was the reason many of them moved westward, often changing their names in order to lose that stigma that went with the name Melungeon. Some believe they started out as descendants of a very early Portugese colony. Marian