Hello. I'm a mod over on /r/IndianCountry, the second largest and most active Native American subreddit. We recently constructed an FAQ with a section that answers this specific question and links to several sources to back it up.

I would like to note, though, that this is more of a social question with a historical context.

In short, according to Gregory D. Smithers, associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of The Cherokee Diaspora, the Cherokee adopted a tradition of intermarriage after contact with the Europeans for several reasons, such as increasing diplomatic ties. Because this was actually encouraged by the Cherokee, it isn't impossible that those from the geographic location of traditional Cherokee territory have a Cherokee ancestor.

However, another thing to note is that most people don't actually know and just say they have Cherokee in them because it is the family legend.

The same professor mentioned above, Gregory D. Smithers, also states (bold is mine):

"But after their removal, the tribe came to be viewed more romantically, especially in the antebellum South, where their determination to maintain their rights of self-government against the federal government took on new meaning. Throughout the South in the 1840s and 1850s, large numbers of whites began claiming they were descended from a Cherokee great-grandmother. That great-grandmother was often a “princess,” a not-inconsequential detail in a region obsessed with social status and suspicious of outsiders. By claiming a royal Cherokee ancestor, white Southerners were legitimating the antiquity of their native-born status as sons or daughters of the South, as well as establishing their determination to defend their rights against an aggressive federal government, as they imagined the Cherokees had done. These may have been self-serving historical delusions, but they have proven to be enduring."

So the reality of things is that people like to claim something even if they don't have exact proof. One reason is the exotic factor of having native blood. That FAQ I linked touches on several other reasons. Point being, while there is some validity to the possibility of one possessing Cherokee blood or an ancestor, most cases are usually false.

There's one question you left out: is this actually a trend, or do you just know an unusual amount of Cherokees?

I'm seriously asking, because I know a lot of people and I've never met someone who claimed to be Cherokee.

I've read somewhere that it was used to hide the fact that they had African American blood. Is there any truth to this claim? edit

These conclusions have been largely upheld in subsequent scholarly and genealogical studies. In 1894, the U.S. Department of the Interior, in its "Report of Indians Taxed and Not Taxed," noted that the Melungeons in Hawkins County "claim to be Cherokee of mixed blood".[3] The term Melungeon has since sometimes been applied as a catch-all phrase for a number of groups of mixed-race ancestry. In 2012, the genealogist Roberta Estes and her fellow researchers reported that the Melungeon lines likely originated in the unions of black and white indentured servants living in Virginia in the mid-1600s before slavery became widespread.[5]

Roberta J. Estes, Jack H. Goins, Penny Ferguson and Janet Lewis Crain, "Melungeons, A Multi-Ethnic Population", Journal of Genetic Genealogy, April 2012