Was Edith Bolling Galt Wilson a Melungeon?

Edith Bolling, a native of Wytheville, Virginia, was the extraordinary wife of two remarkable men. First she survived Norman Galt, a successful jeweler in Washington, D.C., and inherited and ran his business; later she married President Woodrow Wilson and, during his illness, was accused of taking over his job too.

On reading the mini-biography of her encapsulated in this piece of legislation, I wrote the following blog post, which I'm leaving as it is for historical reasons:

http://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2012/02/edith-bolling-wilson-hj98.html

In the post I described Mrs. Wilson as one of our Melungeon community. This may be debatable, depending on who's defining our Melungeon community. While all of Virginia's Bolling family are multiracial (proud descendants of Pocahontas and cousins many times removed of Anne Boleyn), not all of them actually intermarried with Tennessee's Collins/Gibson clan. Some say that only descendants of Vardy Collins and/or Shepherd Gibson can be identified as Melungeons.

I did not bother to look up Edith Bolling's whole family tree, and it's possible that somebody out there may be saying, "Really, if our patrilineal system weren't so unfair, it would make as much sense to call Priscilla King a Melungeon as it does to call Mrs. Wilson one." I have cousins whose legal family name is Gibson, who are direct descendants of Shepherd; none of my own personal ancestors was a Gibson. So these people, if they exist, just might be right. However, whether qualified for membership in the Melungeon nation/tribe/clan or not, I write about them with cousinly respect.

According to this Wikipedia page, Edith Bolling was a racist who "believed her family's former slaves did not want their freedom." (This was a real cliche after the Civil War, and to some extent it was even true--during the postwar chaos, some ex-slaves had nowhere to go.) She also disliked Northerners. She was also a "Progressive"; in her historical period, strange as it may seem, these things were not mutually exclusive.

But was she triracial, or only biracial? Although the Collins/Gibson clan accepted interracial marriage, not all of them practiced it. My cousins' father had to endure the farce of being ruled legally White; now that those interested can get DNA tests for specific hereditary traits, it's been confirmed that some Melungeons are genetically as White as anyone else is. And it's not always possible to tell by looking: Anne Boleyn was said to have a "dark, swarthy, sallow" complexion and to be "strangely" (exotically) beautiful, long before Pocahontas's time.

More Bolling family history is available from Lisa Alther, especially in the book Kinfolks.