What do you think?
Rate this book
POCAHONTAS' DESCENDANTS: A Revision, Enlargement and Extension of the List as Set out by Wyndham Robertson in His Book Pocahontas and Her Descendants
Thomas Rolfe, the son of John Rolfe and Pocahontas, the legendary Indian princess, was the father of Jane Rolfe and (possibly) Anne Rolfe by different wives. Jane subsequently married a Bolling and Anne, an Elwyn, from which unions issued an enormous progeny, today numbering in the tens of thousands and encompassing numerous lines of the colonial Virginia gentry. Starting with the Bolling lines, which include the "white," "red" and "blue" Bollings, this book carries Pocahontas' descendants down to the present time. In this definitive edition of Pocahontas' Descendants, the two volumes of corrections and additions of 1992 and 1994 have been appended to the base volume of 1985, resulting in a consolidated volume in excess of 700 pages, with indexes containing over 30,000 names! A foundation stone in Virginia genealogy and a major contribution to our knowledge of old Virginia families!
Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
13 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 3, 2023
The fonts (plural) are incredibly small and become smaller throughout the book, making this already hard-to-read resource even harder to read and comprehend. It is 99.9 percent statistics with very little narrative. The book is basically a 700-page outline, only worse.
The authors use a series of codes to follow family lineages, which is good in theory but fails miserably in comprehension. Instead of listing the children of a married couple as a group, the lineages of each child and each of their children, and each of their children. etc. are expanded from the 16th century to the 20th century (with some obvious errors). Perhaps this would have been better in chart form or limited to fewer centuries from the onset.
To make matters worse, the original content has been updated twice but the corrections and additions are included as separate volumes at the end of the book instead of incorporating them into the original piece. The book would have been more effective if the edits had been done properly in the text. As it is, the errors remain in the original content, which provokes an unrealistic sense of accuracy and requires the reader to search for them in the additional volumes. It is like hunting for a needle in a haystack without knowing the needle needed to be found. This is where a LOT of confusion, errors, and misconceptions transpire in the attempt to trace the Bolling genealogy. A lot of work went into the compilation of this reference material, but it falls short of being an effective source.
The authors use a series of codes to follow family lineages, which is good in theory but fails miserably in comprehension. Instead of listing the children of a married couple as a group, the lineages of each child and each of their children, and each of their children. etc. are expanded from the 16th century to the 20th century (with some obvious errors). Perhaps this would have been better in chart form or limited to fewer centuries from the onset.
To make matters worse, the original content has been updated twice but the corrections and additions are included as separate volumes at the end of the book instead of incorporating them into the original piece. The book would have been more effective if the edits had been done properly in the text. As it is, the errors remain in the original content, which provokes an unrealistic sense of accuracy and requires the reader to search for them in the additional volumes. It is like hunting for a needle in a haystack without knowing the needle needed to be found. This is where a LOT of confusion, errors, and misconceptions transpire in the attempt to trace the Bolling genealogy. A lot of work went into the compilation of this reference material, but it falls short of being an effective source.
Displaying 1 of 1 review