Probably.

Right up there next to the my-grandma-says-I’m-descended-from-a-Cherokee-princess thing is an almost-as-farfetched American white people myth: that you’re related to Pocahontas. It’s difficult to go a month in online forums about Native ancestry without someone claiming it.

So it came as no surprise when I received an email from FamilySearch.org saying – well, here, I’ll just show you a screenshot from my email:

Let’s be clear, Pocahontas lived a very long time ago. She was born around 1596 and died in 1617 at the age of 21. This was even before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. She was kidnapped by the English of the Jamestown colony at age 17, impregnated, married to one of her captors, converted to Christianity, and taken to London, where she died of an illness. For more, see my blog post, America, meet the real Pocahontas.

According to Pamunkey oral history, when she was kidnapped, Pocahontas was already married to a man named Kocoum and may have already had a baby boy. Further knowledge of that lineage, however, is not documented.

With her captor, John Rolfe, Pocahontas had a child named Thomas Rolfe. Thomas married a British colonist and they had one daughter, Jane Rolfe. Jane married Colonel Robert Bolling, another colonist. They had one child, John Bolling. John was a Virginian “planter” — that’s a euphemism for slave plantation owner. He had six children, all born between 1700 and 1718, who gave him thirty-seven grandchildren. If anyone can document relation to Pocahontas, it is most likely through this route.

On the Cherokee side of my family, my ancestors included several mixed white-Cherokee relationships. The white ones actually do go back to the Jamestown settlement. That said, I’m not aware of any family connection to Bolling, Rolfe, or Pocahontas. When I got the email from FamilySearch, I thought, well, maybe they found something.

But no, they went the long way around. I’d already seen something like this before. I’m a direct descendent of Nancy Ward, Beloved Woman of the Cherokee (1738-1822). From her, FamilySearch once magically wove a connection directly from the Cherokees to Chief Powhatan, Pocahontas’s father, somehow bypassing the Catawba, Muskogee, Shawnee, and any number of other tribes in between. That seemed far-fetched, as I’ve never heard of trade or commerce or even war between the Cherokee and Pamunkey. The latter, by the way, has always been a fairly small tribe, thus further decreasing the odds of a connection. That faux-genealogy has since disappeared from their website.

This time, FamilySearch went an even longer way around. They avoided my Cherokee ancestors and went through my Choctaw great-grandfather (Edwin Erastus Carr) and then up through the white side of his family until they got to a Susannah Anderson (1648-1724). FamilySearch then claimed that Susannah was the Native daughter of Weroansqua Cockacoeske, the “Queen of the Pamunkey” in the late 1600s. They then show how Cockacoeske and Pocahontas were cousins.

WikiTree, which is more rigorously monitored, has this to say about Susannah.

“There is no evidence she was a Native American. Some believe that Susannah is the daughter or granddaughter of Cockacoeske and her husband, Chief Totopotomoi. While Susannah did marry Cornelius Dabney, Cockockoske’s interpreter, there is no evidence that Susannah was anything other than European origin.”

Faux genealogies

So just what is FamilySearch.org? They are the genealogy website of the Mormon Church, driven by crowdsourced information, obviously with limited oversite. You know, so they can baptize all the people who ever lived. Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, and Findagrave.com are even more ludicrous and ambitious in their faux genealogies.  

A lot of them utilize so-called “Princess Cleopatra.” In fact, such a person did exist, though both the title and name may have been provided by English colonists. In reality, there is no documentation of her children.

This one, posted at a website entitled “Mermaidcamp,” purports to show a genealogy again jumping from the Pamunkey to the Cherokee. Not even FamilySearch traces any descendants of Cleopatra. WikiTree asserts there is no documentation that this Fivekiller ever existed.

The Native American Project

Fictional genealogies involving Pocahontas – and probably other historical Indigenous figures – are so prevalent that WikiTree established the Native American Project to clean it up. They note, “There are quite a few fictional, fraudulent, or mythical people who have been included as Native American or married to a Native American.” Their goals are to “have information from reliable sources; include documentation for facts; strive for historical accuracy; avoid stereotyping; present material in a non-biased, culturally-sensitive manner; separate fact from fiction.” Thank you WikiTree.

WikiTree has this to say about Cleopatra:

“Cleopatra” was probably born about 1599-1602 in Tsenacommacah, the home of paramount chief Powhatan, in what is now southeastern Virginia. Based on a 1641 petition from Thomas Rolfe to the General Court (the governing body) in Virginia (from a later copy made before 1691, original now lost) seeking permission to visit his mother’s sister, Cleopatra, this would make her daughter of either Wahunsenacawh Powhatan or one of his many wives.

No one knows what her actual name was, Cleopatra is either a name given to her by the English or the copyist’s attempt to read the original handwriting and getting it wrong. Helen Rountree [a respected historian] and others suggest she may have been the same woman as Mattachanna, a known aunt of Pocahontas who may have accompanied her to London.

There is no documented marriage, no documented name of a husband. There are no documented children. There is no documentation that would indicate who either of her parents was. Her date and place of death are unknown.”

Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, MyHeritage.com, and Findagrave.com should learn from WikiTree and clean up their pages.

The deeper questions

There are deeper questions here. What’s with the national obsession with Pocahontas? Why do people want to be related to her?

She was somewhat forgotten by white society until the 1800s, during the time of Manifest Destiny and ethnic cleansing. Then she was resurrected and appropriated, described as “snatched from the fangs of a barbarous idolatry,” “foremost in the train of those wandering children of the forest,” to quote the artist of her mural in the Capitol Rotunda. She was portrayed as the model good Indian, even though her life story most resembled that of a Nigerian high school girl captured by the radical Islamist group Boko Haram.

Like an Indian mascot, connecting to the Disney version of Pocahontas allows colonizers to revise history, to say we are all connected, to say all is resolved. To establish that connection through a fictitious Cherokee lineage allows people to avoid the reality of the Rolfes and the Bollings, who cast shadows of kidnapping, rape, and slavery over the story.

Truth is, we cannot choose our parents, nor anyone we are descended from. And we shouldn’t try to.

Update since I posted this:

It turns out this is just the tip of the iceberg. These faux genealogies encompass other realms, connecting Americans to European royalty and, especially, the signers of the Magna Carta. On the Native side, these fake names have led to state-sanctioned roadside monuments (“Princess Cornblossom”) and even entire tribes of questionable origin, arguing it out online against a dedicated group of Natives at WikiTree requiring documentation for outlandish claims. In the already-muddy world of Native identity, this whole crowdsourced family history thing is mucking things up further. More on all this in the future.