Born around 1596 as Amonute and privately called Matoaka by her family, the woman history remembers as Pocahontas was the daughter of Wahunsenacawh,

Born around 1596 as Amonute and privately called Matoaka by her family, the woman history remembers as Pocahontas was the daughter of Wahunsenacawh, the paramount chief of the Powhatan Confederacy that controlled the Tidewater region of Virginia. 

Her nickname Pocahontas meant something like "playful one" or "mischievous," fitting for the young woman who became entangled with English colonists at Jamestown starting in 1607. In 1613 she was captured and held hostage by English captain Samuel Argall during ongoing hostilities between the colonists and Powhatan tribes, and during her year of captivity she lived at Henricus where minister Alexander Whitaker taught her about Christianity and English customs. 

She converted to Christianity, was baptized, and chose the name Rebecca. She also met John Rolfe, a widower about ten years her senior who had lost his first wife and infant daughter during the voyage to Virginia and who was developing a strain of tobacco that would become the colony's cash crop. On April 5, 1614, Pocahontas married John Rolfe at age 17 or 18, likely at Jamestown, with her father Chief Powhatan sending one of her uncles and two of her brothers to the wedding. 

The marriage brought eight years of peace between the Jamestown settlers and Powhatan tribes known as the Peace of Pocahontas, and in January 1615 she gave birth to their son Thomas.

In 1616 the Rolfe family traveled to England where the Virginia Company used Pocahontas as a living advertisement for colonial investment, presenting her to English society as proof that Native Americans could be civilized and Christianized. 

She was received at the court of King James I and Queen Anne at the annual Twelfth Night masque at Whitehall Palace, dressed in Elizabethan style and treated as an Indian princess though her people did not use that concept. While in London she became ill and John Rolfe moved her to the countryside hoping she would recover, but in March 1617 as they prepared to return to Virginia, Pocahontas died at age 21 or 22, probably from tuberculosis or pneumonia. She was buried at St. 

George's Church in Gravesend on the Thames River on March 21, 1617 as Rebecca Rolfe, a Christian Englishwoman. Her young son Thomas was too ill to travel, so John Rolfe left him in England with relatives and returned to Virginia alone. 

Thomas Rolfe returned to Virginia around 1635 as an adult, and around 1640 he married Jane Poythress. They had only one daughter, Jane Rolfe, born in 1655. In 1675 Jane married Colonel Robert Bolling, and she bore him only one son, John Bolling, before dying from complications of childbirth. That single bloodline represents an astonishingly thin thread, four generations of only children connecting Pocahontas to the thousands of descendants who would follow.

In 1887, more than 270 years after Pocahontas died, Wyndham Robertson published the first definitive genealogy titled "Pocahontas, alias Matoaka, and Her Descendants Through Her Marriage at Jamestown, Virginia, in April, 1614 with John Rolfe, Gentleman," tracing the family line through Jane Rolfe and Colonel Robert Bolling. 

That initial work was revised and massively expanded in 1985 by Stuart Brown, Lorraine Myers, and Eileen Chappel, who published a base volume identifying over 20,000 descendants just through Jane Rolfe and Robert Bolling. The consolidated definitive edition now exceeds 700 pages with indexes containing over 30,000 names, and five separate volumes of corrections and additions were published through 2004 tracking tens of thousands more descendants. 

All documented descendants trace through either Jane Rolfe who married Robert Bolling, or possibly through a disputed second daughter Anne Rolfe who supposedly married Peter Elwyn and had seven children, though Anne's existence and connection to Thomas Rolfe remains debated among genealogists. 

Descendants of Jane Rolfe and Robert Bolling are called Red Bollings because they carry Pocahontas's DNA, while descendants from Robert Bolling's second marriage to Ann Stith after Jane died are called White Bollings because they descend from a Pocahontas in-law but don't have her blood. Famous documented Red Bolling descendants include First Lady Edith Bolling Wilson, actor Edward Norton, and countless members of colonial Virginia gentry families. 

A Pocahontas Descendants Initiative launched in 2019 estimates that as many as 100,000 people may descend from the single bloodline that started with Thomas Rolfe and narrowed through Jane Rolfe before exploding into an enormous progeny spanning four centuries.