| Jane (Unknown) Rolfe resided in the Southern Colonies in North America before 1776. Join: US Southern Colonies Project Discuss: southern_colonies |
| Jane (Unknown) Rolfe is currently protected by the Native Americans Project for reasons described below. Join: Native Americans Project Discuss: native_americans |
This profile represents the wife of Thomas Rolfe. See Research Notes below for a discussion of her disputed origins.
She married Thomas Rolfe and had one child by him:
She apparently died in Jan 1679 in Charles City, Charles, Virginia Colony.[citation needed]
The origins of the wife of Thomas Rolfe are not confirmed. She is said by some that she was daughter of Francis Poythress and Mary Sloman.[citation needed] But it's not even certain that she was even a Poythress.
Moore and Slatten[1] traced the suggestion that his wife was a Poythress back to a comment by W. G. Stanard in "Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents", in Virginia Historical Magazine (I, 1894, 446-447):
According to Moore and Slatten, Stanard cited as evidence handwritten notes on the flyleaf of a copy of A Complete Collection of All the Laws of Virginia Now in Force Carefully Copied from the Assembled Records (London, 168[?], now in the Library of Virginia. Moore and Slatten state:
Here again a Bolling descendant confused the son with his father. Not recognizing the name 'Payers' as another variant of Peirce, someone searched the records for a name beginning with 'P' and having a 'y' in the first syllable. Francis Poythress lived in adjacent Charles City County and his name ended in s!
Wyndham Robertson, a Bolling descendant, wrote in Pocahontas Alias Mataoka and Her Descendants [2]
He added in justification of his charming adoption of an ancestress, '...no such name as "Poyers" is anywhere known ... the family of Poythress was already settled in Virginia.' ... The result has been the acceptance of a non-existent personage, 'Jane Poythress', in the Bibles of Virginia genealogy, as the bona fide ancestress of many illustrious Virginians. Who the wife (or wives) of Thomas Rolfe may have been remains an unanswered question
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Jane is 23 degrees from Herbert Adair, 19 degrees from Richard Adams, 17 degrees from Mel Blanc, 25 degrees from Dick Bruna, 19 degrees from Bunny DeBarge, 32 degrees from Peter Dinklage, 18 degrees from Sam Edwards, 16 degrees from Ginnifer Goodwin, 19 degrees from Marty Krofft, 15 degrees from Junius Matthews, 12 degrees from Rachel Mellon and 18 degrees from Harold Warstler on our single family tree. Login to find your connection.
[Do you know Jane's family name?] | R > Rolfe > Jane (Unknown) Rolfe
Categories: Virginia Colonists | Charles City County, Virginia Colony | Native American Adjunct
Poythress-252 and Unknown-503909 appear to represent the same person because: a note on Unknown-503909 was ineffective. Please merge.
Note: Poythress has been added as an Other Last Name solely for the purposes to aid searching and prevent duplicates from being created. See below for discussion of this surname.
edited by Liz (Noland) Shifflett
"Moore shows that the often repeated identification of his [Thomas'] wife as Miss Poyers, who was then mistakenly assumed to be Jane Poythress, resulted from assigning to Thomas the third wife of his father (Poyers being a varient of Pierce).
Thanks!
To summarize, Rolfe is known to have married Jane Pierce, whose father is known to be in the colony at that time. Pierce had alternate phoentic spelling Pyers/Payers.
According to The Descendants of Pocahontas: An Unclosed Case", by Elizabeth Vann Moore and Richard Slatten, Magazine of Virginia Genealogy, XXIII, no.3, pp.316, cited by John Frederick Dorman, Adventurers of Purse and Person, 4th ed., Vol. 3, p.26, fn23-24...
...somebody failed to understand Jane Pyers as Pierce, and instead mis-identified a ficticious person Jane Poyhtress.
Suggest the owner of this profile delete it. Or at the very least add Rolfe's *actual* wives to the profile.
Seems like we ought to
a) figure out if Jane Poythress actually married Rolfe
b) who her mother was (Sloman vs Payton)
c) prove the above with non-internet jibjab research sources
d) update this profile among others to clarify
Is anyone working on this? :-)
Does not appear to be much documentation for Peyton or Sloman.