So, who exactly are these blue Fugates?

The blue Fugates are descendants of a man named Martin Fugate. Martin is a French immigrant whom was an orphan. He and his wife settled in eastern Kentucky’s Troublesome Creek.  His wife is a red-head American with a pale complexion woman named Elizabeth Smith. Elizabeth’s complexion was described as being as pale as the mountain laurel that blooms every spring around the creek hollows. Both Martin and his wife carried a recessive gene that caused a blue coloration.

Their first son, Zachariah Fugate, was born a startling blue color. Out of Martin and Elizabeth’s seven children, four of them were blue. Because the gene that they both carried was a recessive gene, they had a twenty-five percent chance of having a blue child with each pregnancy. Because of the area the Fugates lived in is an Appalachian area, it is very rural and isolated. For this reason, Fugate descendants married other Fugate descendants and this caused the recessive gene to just continue over many generations. They also married the people who lived closest to them, the Combses, Smiths, Ritchies, and Stacys. So, naturally the boy married the girl next door even if they did have the same last name. Dennis Stacy, a coal miner and amateur genealogist said, “When they settled this country back then, there were no back roads. It was hard to get out, so they intermarried.”