Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, July 4, 1995                   TAG: 9507050052
SECTION: NATL/ITNL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: HOLIDAY 
SOURCE: LEEF SMITH THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WAS POCAHONTAS PART OF YOUR FAMILY TREE?

With the image of Pocahontas plastered across lunch boxes and beach towels, people are flooding historians with questions about their genealogy, and many of those who know they are descendants are using the movie as a peg to educate their children.

``I've gotten at least 10 calls in the last two weeks from people trying to trace their heritage to Pocahontas,'' said David DeVito, an administrative assistant at the National Genealogical Society in Arlington. ``It's unusual that subject matter like this has struck such a chord.''

Conley Edwards, acting state archivist for the Library of Virginia, based in Richmond, agreed.: ``The movie has stimulated a lot of interest.'' Edwards said he had been getting at least one inquiry a day for the past two weeks.

There are few places where interest is stronger than in Pocahontas' native Virginia, home to many of her offspring.

Denise Sibley is one of them.

The 29-year-old Dale City woman is a 14th-generation descendant of the Powhatan princess who helped England's first Virginia settlers.

``Ever since I was a tiny thing, I knew that Pocahontas was a relative,'' Sibley said. ``As a child, I felt really unique.''

Last week, Sibley took her two young children to see the Disney movie, and their response was enthusiastic, to say the least. Taking his ticket from the cashier, 6-year-old Brandon wasted no time explaining that Pocahontas is his ``great-great grandmother.'' His 4-year-old sister, Brittany, was so wowed by the show that she has since declared her intention to become an Indian princess. Critics who have called the movie inaccurate made no impact on the Sibleys.

Although Denise Sibley has documented her connection to Pocahontas, it is not easy to do so. The problem, Edwards said, is that very few records survived the 17th century. Much of what does still exist is in England, where Pocahontas went to live in 1616 until her death at the age of 22.

``Unfortunately, there's not much in the archives that we can show people'' who are interested in tracing their roots, Edwards said. Usually, ``it takes more than just looking your name up in a book to establish a relationship between two people with the same family name.''

Genealogists say establishing an ancestral link is a long process that relies on family records and hours of research in genealogical libraries.

It was during a 1607 exploring expedition up the Chickahominy River in eastern Virginia, historians say, that Capt. John Smith, a soldier, was captured by a Powhatan hunting party. He was spared execution when Pocahontas, then a young child, reputedly begged her father for his release.

Pocahontas - whose real name was Matoaka - married John Rolfe, one of the English settlers, in 1614 and went with him to England with their son, Thomas Rolfe. In 1635, Thomas Rolfe returned to Virginia, where, historians say, he fathered a daughter, Jane, who in 1675 married a prominent Virginian, Col. Robert Bolling.

The couple produced so many descendants that in the 1920s, the Virginia legislature wrote a ``Pocahontas exception'' into its racial integrity laws that permitted marriage between her racially mixed offspring and white Virginians.

At the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, where an exhibit featuring Pocahontas recently closed, officials point to the runaway sales of a $50 book called ``Pocahontas's Descendants,'' which lists 30,000 offspring.

``It was always considered very prestigious to be a descendant of Pocahontas,'' said William Rasmussen, curator of art at the Virginia Historical Society. ``In the 1700s, her ancestry was cherished and valued. Apparently that's still true today.''