"Pocahontas" Alias Metoaka and Her Descendants

Since I'm from the oldest surviving English colony in the United States, I thought I'd focus this month on one of the most famous Native Americans from Virginia: Pocahontas. She had one son but her descendants now number in the tens of thousands. There are several ancestor associations, which people may join if they can prove their descent from Pocahontas.

Rev. James Mitchell is my 4X great grand uncle

My relationship to Pocahontas is very tortuous and certainly wouldn't gain me admission to any Pocahontas ancestor association were I to want to join. I find it interesting nonetheless as every elementary school history book I was required to use included a chapter on her. I am from Virginia after all!

Matoaka "Pocahontas" also known as Rebecca Rolfe, engraving by 

Simon van de Passe; courtesy of Wikipedia

When I was researching her descendants, I discovered a wonderful old book on Google Play, Pocahantas and Her Descendants, written by Wyndam Robertson and published in 1887.  

The book included seven generations of Pocahontas descendants, including Wyndham Robertson (1803-1888) himself. Robertson included a delightful declaration of love by John Rolfe:

"Pocahontas…to whom my hartie and best thoughts are, and have long bin so entangled and inthralled in so intricate a laborinth, that I was even awearied to unwinde myselfe thereout." 

Wyndham Robertson, painting by Louis Mathieu Didier Guillaume; 

courtesy of Wikipedia

Robertson was the acting governor of Virginia from 1836 to 1837. As senior member of the Council of State, he was also Lt Governor when Governor Littleton Waller Tazewell resigned the office.  At the time the legislature elected the governor and it was controlled by the Whigs so Robertson was not returned to office in 1837. After his term was over he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates several times and was in that office during Virginia's struggles over secession from the Union. Robertson was a staunch Unionist and tried to prevent secession. 

When Abraham Lincoln made his call for troops on April 15, 1861, Wyndham Robertson became "zealously active in all measures in defense of his state." After the Civil War he served on the Committee of Nine, which sought Virginia's readmission into the Union. After long and faithful service to Virginia, he retired and wrote his genealogy book. He died on February 11, 1888, and is buried at Cobbs, Virginia.

He later said about his service to his state during the Civil War:

"And now, after twenty years of experience of yet unripened results, I have no regrets, nor repent a single act of my State, or myself, in these unhappy affairs -- welcoming the end of slavery, but still believing it would have been reached without the horrors of war."


And this is yet another reason I love old books so much -- not only are the subjects of the books fascinating so are their authors.

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Genealogy books are great references but should be considered just that a reference. They are not sources. Even experienced researchers make mistakes. And one of those mistakes put me on a trail that ended Pocahontas. For several months, I believed my sister-in-law descended from the Bermuda Tucker family based on a Tucker genealogy book that claimed her 6 times great grandfather's father was a Henry Tucker of Bermuda. But DNA has proved that the author confused several Henry Tuckers, who lived in Southampton County, Virginia, in the late 1600s. The Bermuda Tuckers married into the Randolph family,  one of the first families of Virginia, that do descend from Pocahontas, but my sister-in-law's Tucker line still deadens with Benjamin Tucker (1714-1799). 

Hello from Connecticut

I'm Margaret and I live in Connecticut, USA, fairly close to New York City with my husband and our dog, Windy.  Our children don't live here most of the time -- the eldest is off on his own and the other two are at universities in western states.  I was raised in California and Arizona, but for the past 15 years we've been here in Connecticut about 35 miles from where my ancestor, John Beers, died about 330 years ago.  In the 10 generation span from John Beers down to me, only one person died in the town where he was born.  Many of my family lines tend to be filled with wanderers.  My Choctaw and Chickasaw ancestors were already living in what is now Mississippi when most of my European  ancestors immigrated to the USA from England, Germany and France in the 1600s and 1700s.  My Irish ancestors came a little later in the mid- to late- 1800s.

I'm excited to meet all of you and learn more about genealogy through this collaboration.  I am also using this as a jumping off point to revive my abandoned genealogy blog, Hummingbird on Her Hand, so named because hummingbirds landed on the outstretched hand of my great grandmother, Ida Austin.

Although I enjoy genealogy, much of the information I write about was and is collected by my mother, Sandra. She has been doing family history research as long as I can remember.  When I was a child, Mom occasionally gave me a paid challenge -- 5 cents for each correct name or date I could write in a blank family tree.  I got pretty good at it and eventually she lowered the rate to 1 cent per fact.

Me with my mother visiting my paternal grandparents in Kansas City c1970.

My mother has spent countless hours researching her lines and my father's, but in the past few decades, she has concentrated on Choctaw Tribal history and is extremely well versed on the Dawes Rolls, many Oklahoma Choctaw family lines and other tribal records.  I have learned a lot from her and this spring I will accompany her again to the National Archives in Washington, DC where I will serve as her copy assistant.  We try to copy records as efficiently as possible when we are there and we read them more carefully later.

In the past few years we have been making genealogical connections through DNA.  This has been pretty slow going, but I now manage the DNA accounts for about twenty family members. We continue recruiting relatives to give samples so that we can try to pinpoint which lines matches fall on.  Although we have good documentation for many family lines, we are missing three of my mother's great- great- grandparents and four of my father's great- great- grandparents.  Our DNA match-ups will be more successful when we fill in those missing surnames.

I look forward to getting to know you all as time goes on.

Margaret