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  Are You Descended from Pocahontas?

This article was written to support an article about Pocahontas' modern descendants, in connection with the main story of our visit to Virginia in 2007.

Establishing a Linear Descendance

How can we know whether Person B is or isn't a direct descendant of Person A? If we have a full enough family tree that both people are in the graph, there is either a line of descent between them or not. If there are several generations between the two people, this brute-force method can be tedious. For instance, suppose they are seven generations apart. Then B can have as many as 128 paths to A's generation. There are online genealogical sites like WikiTree and FamousKin that produce these maps, but they usually don't have seven layers; three or four would be typical. How do we handle the case of two incomplete maps?

If B has an ancestor C who is also a descendant of A, then it follows that B is a direct descendant of A, as illustrated here. So we can establish the truth if we have deep enough family trees: ancestors of B and descendants of A. If all of B's oldest known ancestors are younger than all of A's youngest known descendants, the test is complete. If we search A's descendant tree for each ancestor of B and find a match, the line of descent is established. No match, no relation.

Here's how to use this method to establish some unlikely roots. Of course, it helps to have two people in mind to start with. Let's consider the department store founder Rowland H. Macy and coffee baron Peter Folger. These men were born two hundred years apart, so there's not much hope of finding a single genealogical chart that covers them both. But we can get our information in stages. It's a little tedious, but not overly so. Let's look at the oldest ancestors of Rowland Macy (click the ancestors button) and see if we can find a match among Peter Folger's descendants (descendants button). Not too far down the list of Macy's great-great-grandparents, we find a likely candidate in Daniel Folger. A simple text search among Folger's descendants finds the same name, with the right birth and death dates, and the right wife. It checks out: Peter Folger was Rowland Macy's 4th great-grandfather.

Using the same technique, we can examine Thomas Edison's ancestors and Robert Treat's descendants to learn that Edison was Treat's 5th great-grandson, with Phebe Baldwin Ogden making the connection. Robert Treat was an early governor of Connecticut, who also founded the city of Newark, New Jersey. Maybe producing genes for Edison makes up for giving us Newark.

Dozens of sources tell us that certain famous people are descended from Pocahontas, but none of them explain that assertion. It may be that the stories have been repeated so many times that they take on the appearance of truth, or that each one cites another in a circular gesture of support. Two examples are

• Percival Lowell, noted mathematician and astronomer. He laid the groundwork for Clyde Tombaugh to find the dwarf planet Pluto.
• Nancy Davis Reagan, wife of President Ronald Reagan.

Mr. Lowell was born 260 years after Pocahontas, and Mrs. Reagan more than three hundred. It is not likely we will find family trees of either that go back to Pocahontas' time. Mr. Lowell would have to look back eight or nine generations to find a contemporary of the "American Princess;" Mrs. Reagan, three or four more. Even going back half the distance, as already described, is quite a stretch. But we can do some intelligent searching.

Any mathematician can tell you it's easier to prove something than to refute it. One example proves the truth of an assertion. To prove it false, we have to find all possible ways it can't be true. Because of Pocahontas' unique situation, we don't really have to look back all the way to her spot in the family tree to prove a descendant. Because there were three generations of only children, we only need to test whether a candidate was descended from Col. John Fairfax Bolling (1676–1729). If we include "White Bollings," we need to look back one generation further to his father, Robert Bolling (1646–1709).

It's a small stretch to say that we only need to examine a candidate's ancestors until we find one who was born before John (or Robert) Bolling's first child. If we look back to 1698 (when Jane Bolling Randolph was born) and find an ancestor in Pocahontas' line, the case is made. If we follow all branches back that far and find nobody in Pocahontas' line, the person in question can't be a Red Bolling. To prove or rule out White Bollings, we need to go back to 1682, when Robrt Bolling II was born. He was the oldest child of Robert Bolling and his second wife Ann Stith. That is, he was the oldest possible progenitor of White Bollings.

Percival Lowell

Fortunately for our curiosity, Percival Lowell was from a patrician New England family. On his father's side, his family tree is known all the way back to and beyond another man named Percival Lowell (1570–1664). His mother's ancestors are just as well documented. Here is Percival Lowell's complete family tree, as far back as the ancestors who were born before 1682. I've shown how this analysis can be extended recursively, to show that the modern Percival Lowell is not a Pocahontas descendant, and also hot a White Bolling.

Each ancestor born before 1682 is shown in bold-face type. They are also shown with a shaded background, to indicate they've been ruled out as a descendant of Pocahontas. Where father and mother are both ruled out this way, we can also rule out their children. Each child who is ruled out this way also gets a shaded background, on and on until every single one of Mr. Lowell's ancestors has been eliminated.

The reader will note that this analysis only requires us to compare the an ancestor with one person among Pocahontas' descendants. That person is different if we're looking for Red or White Bollings, but there is only one criterion in each case.

There are two special cases that should be explained, called out as notes in Mr. Lowell's family tree. Both rely on a fact about Thomas Rolfe, son of Pocahontas and John Rolfe. Thomas was born in Virginia, but lived in England for a few years. He returned to Virginia as a young adult, and all of his descendants lived in the New World afterward. Similar is true of Robert Bolling, progenitor of the White Bollings. He was born in Virginia, and all of his descendants remained established in North America. Some of these families may have moved away after a hundred years or so, but that isn't important for this line of thinking.

Percival Lowell gives us a good, clean example. With a family tree that is known for several generations back, it's possible to say conclusively that none of his ancestors put him into the category of Red or White Bollings. The man was a lot of things, but he was not a descendant of Pocahontas.

Nancy Reagan

Nancy reagan's heritage presents more of a problem, as we shall soon see. There are numerous sources that tell us she is descended from Pocahontas, including one dedicated to stories about first ladies of the U.S. Not one of them explains how this is true. They also tell us that Edith Wilson is a descendant, but this is easily proven. Mrs. Reagan's case is a bit more difficult than Mr. Lowell's. The same technique is useful, but this time there are some genealogical dead ends, particularly on Mrs. Reagan's mother's side.

Thanks to a website dedicated to finding kinship among famous people, we can construct a fairly detailed family tree for Nancy Reagan, adding some missing information from geni.com.

We'll use the same method that we used to analyze Percival Lowell's case, but a few additional tricks are needed. Some of the lines can't be traced back far enough to eliminate them as bloodlines from Robert Bolling (potential White Bollings), so we'll introduce the same discriminator to compare against the oldest child of John Fairfax Bolling. If a person is older than that (born 1698), their progeny cannot be Red Bollings. People in this category are identified by showing their names with a light red background.

One more assumption needs to be explained, because some of the people are known but their birth years are not. I have estimated a latest-possible birth year for these people, by assuming they are no more than seventeen years older than any of their children. In one or two cases, this assumption had to be applied twice. I believe it is conservative enough.

This reduces the known family tree from the sample at the left of the screen, to what you see at right. The yellow shading indicates candidates to be compared to Pocahontas' descendants. If the candidate is a descendant, then so is Nancy Reagan. If none of them are, then nobody on the list is descended from Pocahontas — including Nancy Reagan. This candidate list is repeated when the text continues, just after the family tree.

These people were not born early enough to eliminate them as descendants of Pocahontas by the "not Red" or "not White" criteria. If any one of them has Pocahontas' blood, then so does Nancy Reagan. If none are descended from Pocahontas, then neither is Mrs. Reagan.

Wyndham Robertson's 1887 list of Pocahontas' descendants has been revised and corrected five times. None of these candidates' names appear in that tome, nor in its several revisions. We must conclude that Edith Wilson was the only First Lady who descended from Pocahontas. No matter how often it is repeated that Nancy Reagan is in that bloodline, it simply isn't so.

Pocahontas

For completeness, this is Pocahontas' line of descendancy as given by Wyndham Robertson in 1877, to the seventh generation. Most, but not all, of the seventh generation was born after 1800. So, in general, this is as far back as one would need to find a person's ancestors in order to check that person as a possible descendant of Pocahontas.