Conversation so far:
Where did this start?
According to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, which Virginia incorporated into law in 1662.
What where the classes?
children were assigned the social status and ethnicity of their mother, regardless of their father's ethnicity or citizenship.
What is the major diffrence?
This meant the children of African slave mothers were born into slavery.
What was meant to him?
But it also meant the children of free white or mulatto women, even if fathered by enslaved African men, were born free.
What does this mean?
The free descendants of such unions formed many of the oldest free families of.
What happened to the colonies?
Early colonial Virginia was very much a "melting pot" of peoples, and some of these early multiracial families were ancestors of the later Melungeons.
What chaged over generations?
Edward Price's dissertation on Mixed-Blood Populations of the Eastern United States as to Origins, Localizations, and Persistence.
What was stated by this?
These conclusions have been largely upheld in subsequent scholarly and genealogical studies.

Question: What did this add too?
Self-contained rewrite: What did Melungeon add too