Pocahontas, Wife of John Rolfe
Many of the First Families of Virginia can also trace their ancestry to a young Native American named Pocahontas. She was the youngest daughter of Nonoma Winanuske Matatiske and Chief Powhatan, who had created the Powhatan Confederacy in the late 16th century and led the local Native American tribes during the first ten years of the settlement of Jamestown in 1607.
In 1614, Pocahontas married English-born colonist John Rolfe, who arrived in Virginia in 1611 after a trip of great hardship. It included being shipwrecked on Bermuda and the deaths of his first wife and their young son. Rolfe had become prominent and wealthy as the first to successfully develop an export cash crop for the Colony with new varieties of tobacco. The combination of notable Native American and English heritage began when their only son, Thomas Rolfe, was born in 1615, and his offspring. Many married other persons of FFV heritage, as there was a propensity to marry within their narrow social scope for many generations.
Read more about this topic: First Families Of Virginia
Famous quotes containing the word wife:
“Women are taught that their main goal in life is to serve others—first men, and later, children. This prescription leads to enormous problems, for it is supposed to be carried out as if women did not have needs of their own, as if one could serve others without simultaneously attending to one’s own interests and desires. Carried to its “perfection,” it produces the martyr syndrome or the smothering wife and mother.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)