Good Morning To All Virginians those who love Virginia History I need some help with resolving a question on the descendants of a Native Virginian. The NGS Conf for 2007 was held in Richmond and the NGS Banquet speaker was Dick Cheatham. He purported to be a 14th generation descendant of Pocahontas and spoke in costume and character of John Rolfe of Jamestown, second husband of Pocahontas. John Rolfe and Pocahontas had one child, a son, named Thomas Rolfe. First Assumption: Mr. Cheatham's lineage is via Thomas Rolfe. I find no writings indicating that Pocahontas had any children by her first marriage to an Indian from her tribe. I am now reading *Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough;Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown* by Helen C. Rountree, University of Virginia Press, 2005. I got to this text by the numerous referrals to it in *The River Where America Began; A Journey Along the James* by Bob Deans, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers , Inc., 2007. In this text he was quite complimentary of the effort by Helen C. Rountree on the Pocahontas book. Now for a lengthy quote from the Rountree book. “Thomas Rolfe grew up in England as an Englishman, though he retained a sympathy for his mother’s folk. His passage to Virginia was paid in 1635, when he was nineteen or twenty, by his stepmother’s father, and he took his place in Anglo-Virginian society as a landowner, his father’s heir…. His later career is shadowy, and he was dead by 1681. Nobody in Virginia, elsewhere in America, or in England seems to have taken more interest in either Pocahontas or her descendants until well after 1800, when the aristocratic Randolph family’s oral tradition of descent from her (through the Bolling family) began to be publicized. Before that, none of her descendants’ ancestry was any more the subject of record making that that of most other Virginians. … Consequently, the tens of thousands of people proudly claiming descent from Pocahontas today----or asking genealogists to prove such descent for them---cannot actually trace a line of authentic, contemporary documents stretching back to Thomas Rolfe. No one can.[Here Ms. Rountree references Moore and Slatten, 1985, Magazine of Virginia Genealogy 23 (3):3-16] Elements of Pocahontas are out there in the gene pool, allright, but they probably dwell in a great many people with whom the *blue bloods* would rather not associate”. So first did we/do we believe that Mr. Cheatham is truly a descendant of Pocahontas when he was booked for the NGS Conference? One would think since he was speaking of his lineage to a genealogical society he would have been vetted to some degree. I personally don’t remember him using any qualifiers on his lineage. Secondly does anyone have scholarly references that have been vetted they could share with us. No! I do not think I was a descendant. No! I do not have a client that thinks they are a descendant. The interest in this book was raised by the many references to it in the *The River…* and I am from Virginia and love Virginia history. Now I have what I perceive as a contradiction in facts. I look forward to your comments. -- Douglas Burnett Satellite Beach FL To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-roots.html