From the book Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley, the author writes "....Ellen Bloomfield, a Jamaican woman who had roots in the parish of St. Ann, where her family owned a small coffee farm called Aboukir....The Marley family has long presented itself to the world as white, but a wedding certificate for the marriage of Robert Marley and Ellen Bloomfield (who was eighteen years old at the time) lists him as “white” and her as “colored.” Later generations of the Marley family were unaware of Bloomfield’s racial designation. She may have passed for white."

See sources for the aforementioned wedding certificate.

An interview from the early 2000s by Heather Marley, a distant cousin of the Marleys, started the rumor that this branch of the family has "Syrian Jewish" ancestry. Nothing in the genealogical record indicates this as of yet. The Marleys came from the south of England, and the Bloomfields, while a little more obscure, seem to have been very light-skinned mixed-race people with deeper roots in Jamaica.