It is good that you question the myths, rather than get all romantic about the NOTION of having Cherokee blood before you have any proof whatsoever. Once that pseudo-identity is internalized people will do the sloppiest research in genealogy to "make" someone "Cherokee" that wasn't. They want to "prove" this ancestry by any means necessary...so, they'll come up with all kinds of alternative "Cherokee" history of families hiding out and passing for white, etc.
But, you want real facts to help you do research? Consider this:
The Cherokee population just leading up to the Trail of Tears was about 17-18000 souls still in the east. That is a small population we are talking about. About 1/3 of the tribe had already moved west ahead of the forced roundups. The majority of Cherokees were living WITHIN THEIR OWN TERRITORY, or what was left of their remaining lands. Only a tiny fraction could be found outside of the Cherokee borders in the mid to late 1830s. These were mostly a few women (and particularly of mixed blood) living with their White/American spouses. This is the statistical and demographic reality.
But, here is the most important thing about trying to do research on "Cherokee ancestry" based on location or some kind of regional osmosis:
If you look at the traditional Cherokee settlement patterns, territorial claims, land cessions and the process of White settlement, you can plainly see that ALL of Kentucky was never really heavily settled by Cherokee. In fact, it WASN'T at all. There were no major villages there. Ever. It was more of a hunting ground and miltiary buffer zone between tribes. And it was also claimed by other tribal nations. It was just that the Cherokee were strong enough to claim it and defend it and eventually ceded it to Europeans. And they did this early in American history. Most of the lands in Kentucky were ceded by the Cherokee Nation right after Americans declared Independence in 1777, and the remaining sliver in south central part of the state was ceded to the Americans in 1806.
Once Cherokee ceded this territory, whites moved in, and the few Cherokee that may have been in that area had to moved out. There were not a bunch of Cherokees just hanging out in these lands. To claim that this is the case...well, it's just historically inaccurate. There were few Cherokees in KY before the 1777, and almost none after 1806. Any Cherokees that were living there were sojourning far away from their people, hundreds of miles away from the closest Cherokee communities and they would represent isolated aberrations. Of course, this doesn't exclude Cherokee or Native American war parties taking forays into formerly ceded territory. But, this led open warfare with White settlers. It wasn't as if Cherokee families weren't somehow trying to settle Kentucky after ceding this territory.
The majority of the Cherokee tribe moved west by 1840. The notion that there were "many" that stayed behind is the biggest fallacy in "Cherokee genealogy." No, there were a finite number of Cherokees that did this, and they also represented a minority of the main body. It was not "many," it was "a small number." People have to get some perspective on this when they are doing Cherokee genealogy. Most of the people that were able to stay behind made their way to the 1817 and 1819 allottment communities in extreme western NC, along the Econoluftee River. There were a few hundred families that stayed behind, not thousands.
The other group that stayed behind were some mixed bloods that were already married to non-Cherokee spouses. They were not large numbers and they are found on several rolls. They weren't "hiding out" because that was part of the terms of the removal treaty. They could choose to stay. They just had to forfeit their tribal affiliation and become American citizens. The Cherokees that didn't want to do that moved west or took to the area around Qualla. The few fullblood families that stayed in extreme SE TN eventually moved over to Qualla as well (in the early 1900s). There were no large numbers of Cherokees remaining in the southeast after 1840. Just some scattered families in their former territories and one intact community in western NC. That is it. A smattering of low blood Cherokee descendants could be found, but the only intact community in the east after 1840 was around Qualla. There were no communities in Kentucky. So, there could be no high degree of blood for people born in that state within the last few generations. They only way a "Kentuckian" can have any real Cherokee ancestry is if they can show an ancestor came from hundred of miles south and were from real, recognized Cherokee families.