Another version of the origin of the Melungeon, this time Africa:

They first settled in Virginia one year before the Pil-grims landed at Plymouth Rock. They were free Americans 150 years before George Washington fought the British.
Some of their descendants are world famous: Abraham Lincoln through his mother Nancy Hanks, actor Tom Hanks, Elvis Presley, Heather Locklear, Ava Gardner, comedian Steve Martin, singer-writer Rich Mullins and many others.
Yet the African-American ancestors of mixed groups like the Melungeons and their brothers, the Lumbees, Red Bones, Brass Ankles, and others are only now beginning to emerge from the dim mists of early American history.

African Origins of the Melungeons
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The following advertisement was placed in the North Carolina Gazette on April 10, 1778 by Johnson Driggers, a desperate Melungeon father seeking his abducted children.

"On Saturday night, April the 4th, broke into the house of the subscriber at the head of Green's Creek - where I had some small property under the care of Ann Driggers, a free Negro woman - two men in disguise, with marks on their faces and clubs in their hands, beat and wounded her terribly and carried away four of her children, three girls and a boy, the biggest of said girls got off in the dark and made her escape, one of the girls name is Becca, and other is Charita, the boy is named Shadrack..."

This early newspaper notice described a common threat to free blacks and Melungeons in 18th century America. The lucrative American slave market enticed man-stealers to prey on free African and free mulatto communities. Freeborn mulatto Drury Tann of the Melungeon Tann family of North Carolina, applied for his Revolutionary War pension in 1834. In his pension application is an account of his early abduction by man-stealers.

"He (Tann) was stolen from his parents when a small boy by persons unknown to him, who were carrying him to sell him into Slavery, and had gotten with him and other stolen property as far as the mountains on their way...his parents made a complaint to a Mr. Tanner Alford who was then a magistrate in the county of Wake State of North Carolina, to get me back from those who had stolen me and he did pursue the rogues and overtook them at the mountains and took me from them."

On March 12, 1754, John Scott, a "free Negro" of Berkely County, South Carolina with Melungeon ties filed an affidavit notifying authorities in Orange County, North Carolina of a similar abduction.

"Joseph Deevit, Wm. Deevit, and Zachariah Martin entered by force the house of his daughter, Amy Hawley, and carried her off by force with her six children, and he thinks they are taking them north to sell as slaves."

Malungu: The Mbundu-African Origin of the American Melungeons
Tim Hashaw
Gowen Research Foundation