Many people go through their whole life not knowing their heritage. I recently had an opportunity to do a little research on my ancestors and I found my pedigree is very diverse; their history ranges the Isle of Man, to the mountaintops of the Appalachian Mountains. This is the part of my research that became very difficult. It seems that an abundance of people from the Appalachian region have been overlooked or shunned by the American government and history alike, they are the Melungeons. I became very interested in finding out some answers about the Melungeons when I was informed one of my relatives was a very famous Melungeon named Mahala Collins which we will talk about later in this paper. There is really no definite answer on where these people came from, or why they were here. I have discovered a few theories, from them being Portuguese sailors, to criminals that England banished from their country. Wherever they came from it wasn't long before they were being discriminated against here by the American government and by the American people in general. They were forced into refuge, high in the mountainous region of the Appalachians. I wanted to know who were these people they called Melungeons and why were they shunned by the early settlers of this nation.
             There are many stories or possibilities of where the Melungeon people originated. We will explore the most prevalent. The first is that are the people from the Lost Colony of Roanoke, in 1585 England sent a ship with 108 people aboard, and they landed in Roanoke, Virginia. They were there less than 1 year and they just disappeared. It is a belief that these colonists moved away from Roanoke and bladed in with the nearby Indian tribes. Another possibility is that England and Spain were weeding out criminals and poor people from their society and then shipping them to America, where the American Indian must have accepted them into their tribes. It seems that t...