I want to believe, I really do. But this article explains why I can't. It's a long story.

It seems more likely than not that Ka-Okee is a fictional character. She keeps trying to creep into my family tree through the Elkins family, but I don't take it seriously. There is zero evidence for her existence. The oral history is so vague and weak that Bill Deyo didn't hesitate to override the "sacred tradition" of the Mattiponi and give Pocahontas' child a sex change. The story simply isn't credible.

Abominable Mixture page 186-187 says

"During the 1650s the general population's 'feares and terrors' of Indian depredations, though usually unfounded, were strong discouragements to any form of race mingling... Then came troubles with the Doegs and Patawomekes in the 1660s... in 1666, the outraged Governor William Berkeley thought 'it necessary to destroy all these Northerne Indians.' Berkeley contended that their obliteration could be accomplished 'without expense' because captured native women and children would 'defray all expense' when sold as slaves... If Virginia's ruling class was prepared to exterminate entire tribes and to enslave captured native women and children, what treatment could Indians expect from the 'meaner sort' of English settler?"

The hostile atmosphere in the 1630s (when Pettus and Ka-Okee supposedly married) wasn't conducive to marriage-making, and the situation had not improved in the 1650s and 1660s when their descendants allegedly married. There were times when the English may have been less hostile toward the Patawomeck than to some other tribes, but it's unlikely that they ever trusted the Patawomeck completely or saw them as equals.

The distance between Jamestown and Passapatanzy	Indian lands before English arrival (Virginia Places)	English boundary after the treaty of 1646 (Wikipedia)

The geography didn't favor an English-Patawomeck union. The Patawomeck lands were 80 miles from Jamestown, with the lands of several other tribes separating them from the English. Their interaction with the English seems to have been a mixture of confrontation and cooperation, according to whichever strategy suited the needs of the Patawomeck at the time.  Encyclopedia Virginia reports that "the tribe lived relatively far from the English settlement at Jamestown but nevertheless played a major role in the politics and warfare of the early colonial period. In an effort to maintain its own independence, the Patawomeck tribe regularly played its more powerful Indian neighbors and the English colonists against one another." Most of the time, there would have been little need for English-Patawomeck contact apart from trading activity.

Encyclopedia Virginia tells the story of English-Patawomeck relations; there was some trading and some killing. In 1613, a Patawomeck chief conspired with the English to kidnap Pocahontas, who was visiting Passapatanzy. The Patawomeck refused to join the other tribes in the 1622 uprising, and helped the English attack some rival tribes during the war that followed. There is no indication that a cooperative relationship continued after the end of this war. The Patawomeck lands were still a long way from the English settlements, and a racial separation policy was in place from 1632 onward. By 1646, the English settlement had spread to cover about half the distance between Jamestown and Passapatanzy.

In 1623 there was a "poison party" where the English lured at least 200 warriors to a supposed peace meeting and poisoned their drinks, killing most of them; the remainder were shot (Colonial Williamsburg). The location is disputed, but the main Patawomeck village at Marlborough Point is a primary candidate; the relative neutrality of the Patawomeck might be a reason for holding a peace meeting at their village.  It is thought that the Patawomeck may have conspired with the English, but it's also believed that at least one Patawomeck chief may have died at this event (Encyclopedia Virginia, HMBD). Deyo's Patawomeck Ancestors article mentions "the famous Poison Plot, in which Dr. John Pott prepared a poison punch that killed over 200 Indians at Patawomeck, including many chiefs", agreeing that it happened on Patawomeck land but remaining silent about whether the Patawomeck were conspirators or victims. 

The colony continued to grow, and serious encroachment on Patawomeck lands had begun by 1654. Encyclopedia Virginia reports that the colonists patented 12,600 acres in the area that year, that in 1655 Wahanganoche himself allowed the patent of thousands more acres, and that "by then many Patawomeck Indians had either died of disease or moved away, leaving the planters of Westmoreland County eager to take advantage of the tribe’s relative weakness".

Wikipedia says, "After settlers began moving into their [the Patawomeck's] area in the 1650s, pressures mounted in competition over resources and differing ideas of how to use land. Violent disputes followed." The trouble escalated to the point that genocide sounded like a mighty good idea to the English, and they acted on the idea. "In 1666, the governor’s Council declared war on the Patawomeck, calling for 'their utter destruction if possible and that their women and children and their goods … shall be taken to be disposed of.' A 1669 census recorded no Patawomeck warriors, and the tribe disappeared from all colonial records." Encyclopedia Virginia confirms this account.

Did the English and Indians ever make love not war? The Potomac tribes had a more relaxed attitude toward sex than the English did, so  there was probably some unmarried sexual activity going on between the communities (at least in the early days), even though the English community in general frowned on it. Inevitably this would have resulted in children being born, who would have remained with their Indian mother. Later on, there might have been some gene flow in the other direction as mixed-race individuals who could pass for English chose to join the English community.

So the claims about Englishmen marrying descendants of Pocahontas look very, very iffy. The disconnect between the Deyo story and the documented state of affairs is very startling. Was he so busy creating family trees that he didn't have time to look at the historical realities?

The oral history

The only contemporary documentation for Pocahontas' first husband Kocoum is a book by William Strachey, written in 1612 (or 1616 according to some sources),  saying “younge Pocohunta, a daughter of his, using sometyme to our fort in tymes past, nowe married to a private Captaine, called Kocoum, some two years since.” Notice that there is no mention of a child. Strachey was in Jamestown from May 1610 to September 1611 and served as Secretary of the colony.  Some people think that "Kocoum" was actually a reference to John Rolfe. If that's the case, it's very strange that Strachey used an Indian name for Rolfe instead of his English name; unless he meant that Kocoum was what the Indians were calling Rolfe.  Rolfe and Pocahontas married in 1614, when Strachey had already returned to England. But it's possible that Strachey had information on subsequent events, so we can't rule this out as a reference to Rolfe. The book wasn't actually published until 1849, so we can't be sure of the timing.

We have a pretty good idea of when Pocahontas was born. John Smith met her in 1608 and that same year he wrote that she was ten years old. In 1616, he wrote that she was 12 or 13 in 1608. This leaves a narrow window for her birthdate of 1596-1598. She married John Rolfe in 1614, when she would have been 16 to 18 years old. If Strachey's report was written in 1612, she would have married Kocoum around 1610, when she was 12 to 14 years old.  This is possible. Historic Jamestowne says "Pocahontas had her coming of age ceremony, which symbolized that she was eligible for courtship and marriage. This ceremony took place annually and boys and girls aged twelve to fourteen took part."

In the same article, Deyo says "Years later, when the compiler began his research, the elders at that time knew that Pocahontas was their ancestor but did not know how."

So the "oral tradition" consists of a vague story about something that happened 400 years ago, and some people who believe they're descended from Pocahontas but don't know the details. It's as convincing as those "Cherokee princess" stories that so many families have. It's very easy for inaccurate family traditions to start, when "what if" turns into actual belief or when someone decides to liven up a party with a tall tale.  Indian Reservations has an article on the Little Kocoum/Ka-Okee conundrum, saying that the Custalow book "is quite clear that the child was a boy and goes on to say that some of his descendants are alive today including the entertainer Wayne Newton". If the Mattaponidon't really know anything about this child, then how do they know who his descendants are?

There does not appear to be an oral tradition about what this alleged child did after being born. There is NOT an old oral tradition that Ka-Okee grew up to marry Thomas Pettus or anyone else - that's 21st century speculation about the origins of Christian Waddington. Bill Deyo looked at some families who claimed descent from Pocahontas and traced them back (correctly or incorrectly) to Christian Waddington, and declared that Christian must have been Ka-Okee's daughter.

Wikipedia says that the Patawomeck tribe disappeared as a cultural entity for about 250 years. The Pocahontas tradition described by Deyo apparently consists of individual family stories rather than something that has been passed down collectively as a piece of tribal history. Pocahontas was a local hero, so it would be natural for families in the area to start claiming descent from her whether there was any basis for it or not.

From Our Patawomeck Ancestors, "After finding out about the descent from Pocahontas and Kocoum, the task began to figure out the exact lineage. This was not difficult because every family line which carried the knowledge of a descent from Pocahontas went back to the Martin family and the Indian girl, Ka-Okee."

This makes it sound like the families had preserved the memory of everyone from Ka-Okee on down, but forgot that Pocahontas was Ka-Okee's mother. This is unlikely, unless you want to argue that there was a conspiracy to keep Ka-Okee and her children from finding out who her mother was.

What seems more likely is that these are the elders who believed they were descended from Pocahontas but didn't know how. Christian Waddington wasn't famous or rich, and her only documented act was confirming her relationship with the unremarkable Frances Golber. There was no reason for her descendants to preserve her memory for 300 years if they didn't know she was the granddaughter of Pocahontas.

What also seems likely is that somebody went on a hunt to find names that they could attach to the family stories. There was a relevant family named Martin, and a woman named Christian Martin Waddington was found, and then a guy was found who acquired land in the right area at the wrong time and had a sister named Christian. Add one giant leap of faith and you've got Christian Pettus Martin Waddington.

I don't see why a birthdate of 1636-1637 is convincing evidence that someone is the granddaughter of Pocahontas. Ka-Okee was allegedly born around 1610-1612, and could have had children at any time from about 1625 onwards. Bad logic pervades the whole story, and this isn't the worst example of it.

Bill Deyo says he discovered that the families with Pocahontas traditions share Christian Waddington as an ancestor. I haven't attempted to verify this; considering the quality of the rest of his work, we shouldn't take for granted that he's right. I'm willing to let it pass, but I'm not willing to take the gigantic leap of faith that Pocahontas was Christian's grandmother. The families themselves apparently had no clue about the specific line of descent, and it was Bill Deyo not family tradition that identified Christian Waddington as a common ancestor.

Wikitree's Ka-Okee profile says "Research suggests that this person may never have existed", and there is similar labeling on several other profiles associated with this story. Wikitree has two profiles for Thomas Pettus: one for the documented historical person, and a fictional profile to go with the Ka-Okee legend. The fictional Pettus profile says that Bill Deyo "does not offer any documentable proof for this claim, only his desire that it be true... We also feel strongly that the origins of this theory should be known and understood for what they are-- a 21st [century] creation of someone who desired to be a descendant of Pocahontas. "

We don't know when Thomas Pettus arrived in Virginia. About 1630 is one estimate, based on the notion that he decided to head for Virginia after beating a murder rap in England in 1629. But he might not be the same Thomas Pettus who beat the rap. A date of 1638-1641 is more popular, based on the premise that he was serving in the 30 Years War until 1637. But it's doubtful whether he actually served in this war. There are claims that he was sent to Jamestown in 1638 with 40 men to protect the colonists from Indian aggression, but this is apparently false (Indian Reservations). The first actual record of him in Virginia is in 1642.

When could Pettus have met Ka-Okee? The best opportunity would have been during the war of 1622-1632, but there's no indication that he was in Virginia at this time. After 1632 a policy of racial separation was in place with a border wall to enforce it, and the Patawomecks lived 80 miles away from Jamestown. For about sixty years beginning in 1624, a license was required to trade with the Indians (The Indian trade in colonial Virginia page 17-19), and there's no indication that Pettus was ever a trader. It doesn't look like there was much opportunity for visiting.

Thomas had married Englishwoman Elizabeth Freeman Durant by 1643, when their relationship is mentioned in a legal document. The estimated date of the marriage is as early as 1638. The alleged Ka-Okee marriage has been dated anywhere from 1631 to 1645; based on the established birthdate of Christian Waddington, the Ka-Okee marriage probably would have been no later than 1636. As late as 1634, it looks like Wahanagoche was underage and a regent was in charge of the Patawomeck tribe. Who would have power-brokered this marriage, and why?

Bill Deyo's Wahanganoche article says "She [Ka-Okee] married a Mr. Pettus, an Englishman, and raised a number of children on land adjoining her cousin, Wahanganoche." Notice that this is just a Mr. Pettus with no first name and no credentials besides "Englishman". In the 1630s, Wahanganoche's land was still a long way from English territory. For Pettus and Ka-Okee to be such close neighbors of Wahanganoche, they must have been living in the Indian community.

That doesn't sound like a place where Thomas Pettus would have lived. He was a member of the Virginia Governor's Council for about twenty years starting in 1642, so he clearly had ambitions within the English community. The council was an important government body, and it's unlikely that they would welcome an Englishman who had married into the enemy camp and lived among the Indians long enough to raise several children. According to Wikipedia, "The members of the Council were almost all wealthy and both socially and politically prominent. Independent wealth was required both for the social standing necessary for membership and also to permit the members to be absent from their families and plantations for long periods of time." Pettus couldn't just "go native" for a few years, then materialize out of the wilderness saying "Here I am, put me on the council."

But what was she doing there? Her father, the leader of the Powhatan confederacy at Tsenacommacah, was Pamunkey not Patawomeck. Little is known about her mother; the Custalow book says the mother was Mattaponi, but this is disputed, and nearly every Powhatan tribe has claimed Pocahontas as their own at one time or another (Pocahontas Lives).  Indian wives went to live in their husband's village (Encyclopedia Virginia) and it's claimed (without evidence) that Kocoum was the brother of the Patawomeck chief. Historic Jamestowne says "Rumors of the English wanting to kidnap Pocahontas resurfaced, so she and Kocoum moved to his home village. While there, Pocahontas gave birth to a son." This information is apparently from the Custalow book, which is listed as the article's first source; so it may not be reliable.  If Little Kocoum was born in Passapatanzy, it's reasonable that he might continue to live there after losing his parents. The Custalow book says that Kocoum was killed during the kidnapping.

Thomas Pettus owned more than one piece of land, which was common for wealthy men at the time. His primary residence was the Littletown Plantation (Wikitree), located at the current site of the Kingsmill Resort marina on the James River (Rootsweb). It's close to Williamsburg and about four miles east of Jamestown. Passapatanzy is 80 miles north of this.

Littletown was close enough to the seat of English government that Thomas could be part of the action easily enough. Passapatanzy was far from the hub and deep in Indian territory, so it would be hard to live there and be a prominent government figure at the same time. If a Pettus/Ka-Okee marriage actually occurred, it's hard to believe that the bridegroom was Thomas Pettus the bigwig.

So the story isn't holding together very well. Ka-Okee wasn't just anybody, she was royalty. If a Patawomeck princess married a prominent Englishman at a time when both communities disapproved of intermarriage, you'd expect it to cause enough controversy for somebody to write about it. The English might not know or care if an obscure Englishman married Indian royalty out in the middle of nowhere, but the Patawomeck probably wouldn't be too happy about it.

There are some who say that it must have been Theodore Pettus who married Ka-Okee, not Thomas. Wikitree says that Theodore was probably related to Thomas; but there is enough confusion about the Pettus family relationships for this to be uncertain.  Theodore Pettus was recorded in Virginia in 1623. Some sources say this is the only record of him in Virginia, and others say there is another record in 1626. But then he definitely vanishes from the record in both Virginia and England. We don't know whether he was dead or alive after 1626, or where he was if he was still alive. Recordkeeping was spotty during this time period, and some records have been lost. If there aren't any Pettus records in Virginia between 1626 and 1641, it certainly doesn't prove that there weren't any Pettus men there during this time period.

It looks like Bill Deyo's thinking evolved beyond a nondescript "Mr. Pettus" into a full-blown belief that it was Thomas Pettus the bigwig. From Deyo's Henry Meese article:

"Mary’s mother is strongly believed to have been a daughter of Col. Thomas Pettus and his first wife, Ka-Okee, daughter of Pocahontas and her first husband, Kocoum, younger brother of Japasaw. That would help to explain why Col. Thomas Pettus deeded his land that adjoined Chief Wahanganoche to Henry Meese, who would have been the husband of his granddaughter, Mary."

Bill Deyo often uses the word "deeded" to make land sales sound like a gift, but they weren't. There are more logical explanations for land transactions near Passapatanzy that have nothing to do with marriage relationships, and everything to do with the English desire to acquire more and more land. There was serious English encroachment on Patawomeck territory beginning in the 1650s, and it was not a friendly takeover. Pettus received a colonial land grant of 1000 acres near Passapatanzy in 1652, long after the end of any marriage to Ka-Okee. Wahanganoche had nothing to do with the transaction. The original grant can be viewed online. This land was granted to Pettus by the colonial government in 1652 (Library of Virginia, Land Office Patents book #4, page 371) and re-granted to him in 1658 (Library of Virginia, Land Office Patents book #3, page 171). Pettus had been married to his English wife Elizabeth for at least 10 years when he first acquired this land. One has to work very hard at ignoring the timeline, the documentation, and the history of the region to construe these transactions as having anything to do with Ka-Okee. 

In 1665, Henry Meese bought this land from Pettus; it was located on Potomac Creek at "Wipsewasin Creek" (Colonial Settlers, Wikitree).  It's hard to figure out exactly where this creek is. But Potomac Creek is identifiable enough, and there's a spit of land called Whipsawasons Point that's about two miles directly north of Passapatanzy. Wikipedia says that the modern Passapatanzy district covers two square miles, so it's in the right neighborhood.

Colonial Settlers shows that Meese bought parcels from several other English landholders in the Whipsawason area around this time. There are multiple entries for a 1660 land sale between Pettus and Meese, stating that Meese had offered Pettus the sum of 90 pounds sterling for 1000 acres; it's not clear how close this was to the 1665 parcel. It was obviously easy for Englishmen to acquire land near Passapatanzy without having to marry an Indian first, and there is no reason to think that family connections had anything to do with these land transactions. Wahanganoche was already dead when Meese bought Pettus' Whipsawason land in 1665, and the tribe lost the rest of their land at about the same time. Wikipedia says "In October 1665, the colonial government forced the tribe to sell their remaining land to the colony for a few matchcoats". A genocidal war drove the tribe to cultural extinction in the following year (1666).

Deyo's Henry Meese article says:

"By the early 1660’s, he [Meese] was in the area of Stafford County, Virginia, and had become the son-in-law of Wahanganoche, King of Patawomeck. The story was told by some of his descendants that he gave livestock to the Chief for the hand of the Chief’s daughter in marriage. In 1662, Wahanganoche deeded land to Henry Meese. This time frame matches the age range of Henry’s children, as stated in his will of 1681."

Maybe Bill Deyo is the descendant who's been telling the story about livestock, since he's also the one telling an undocumented story about an Englishman marrying an Indian princess in troubled times when the tribe was on the edge of extinction. The comment about Meese's children makes no sense; it's documented that Meese married in England in 1675, and that all four of his known children were born in England after 1675.  Meese died in England before April 1682 (Wikitree). The will states that the children are minors and leaves the Virginia land to them (Genealogy.com). Their age range has nothing to do with the 1662 land transaction or anything else that happened in Virginia.

His Meese Update article says "Col. Henry Meese has long been believed to have first married a daughter of Chief Wahanganoche, who allowed him to live on his land and eventually deeded that land to Henry Meese".  Believed by who?

It's true that Wahanganoche confirmed a sale of land to Meese in 1662, but it's unlikely that family connections had anything to do with it.  As a result of the intercultural violence, Wahanganoche was a prisoner of the English in 1662, on trial for his life. The Wahanganoche story will be told more fully in a later section. But for now it's enough to know that the March 1662 Virginia Assembly transcript confirms the sale (not gift) of land to Henry Meese, shortly after it discusses the trial of Wahanganoche. The sales price was not specified, but this is common. Meese arrived in North America (Maryland) in 1655 and didn't come to Virginia until 1660. So if Wahanganoche "allowed" Meese to live on his land it wasn't for very long. The marriage must have happened within two years of Meese's arrival, at a time when competition and violence between the communities was escalating. If Meese married an Indian at this time, it wasn't likely to sit very well with either community.

In 1667 Meese had to apply to the court for permission just to employ an Indian (Wikitree), so I doubt that it was easy to marry one just five years before that.

In his Meese Update article, Deyo complains that people are claiming that Col. Henry Meese (who allegedly married Wahanganoche's daughter by Unknown Pettus) never met Wahanganoche and was never in the area before his death. To refute this accusation, Deyo posts the relevant portion of the Assembly transcript. I have marked selected parts in bold font:

“Laws of Virginia, March 1661-2: WHEREAS Wahanganoche king of the Potowmeck Indians acknowledged before the committee appointed for the Indian busines, the sale of that whole tract of land possest by Mr. Henry Mees in Potowmeck according to the bounds and marked trees which he confest were marked in his presence and with his consent, it is ordered by the assembly that the said Mees enjoy the said land to him and his heires for ever. SALE of land by Wahanganoche king of Potomack, to H. Mees confirmed.” This shows that, not only did Wahanganoche deed land to Henry Meese, but that Henry Meese was already allowed to reside on the land previous to the deed. The only logical reason for the Chief to allow Meese to reside on his land was that Meese was married to the Chief’s daughter.

A more realistic interpretation is that Meese acquired the land and took possession of it at an earlier date, but the purchase hadn't been officially recorded yet.  The English were meticulous about recording land transactions within the colony. But Indian lands were probably out of their jurisdiction, so Meese couldn't get a proper deed at the time of purchase.  The arrest and trial of Wahanganoche brought the chief into a venue where he could tell the authorities about the land sale. Assembly meetings were not a normal place to report land sales, but may have been the best that Meese could do. We still don't know whether Meese and Wahanganoche ever met - Meese could have used an agent to make his land purchases. Ditto for Ashton and Pettus.

At the same time, Wahanganoche also acknowledged a sale of land to "Peter Austin" (better known as Peter Ashton) for the price of 10 matchcoats, which sounds far less than the value of the land. A matchcoat was a native garment consisting of about 7 feet of rough woolen cloth that was worn wrapped around the body.

According to Deyo's Elkins article, Peter Ashton "is believed to have married a daughter of the Chief, due to the Chief deeding him land and giving him a gift that was recorded in the Virginia Council records". Deyo's Wahanganoche article calls Ashton's wife Grace. And never mind that there are no records of Ashton having any wife whatsoever, and it appears that Grace did not exist (Wikitree, Indian Reservations). The council records clearly state that the land transaction was a sale, and they don't mention a gift (transcript, VA Genweb). Ashton arrived in Virginia after 1650, when the racial separation policy was already well established and it would have been difficult to form a friendly relationship with the Indians (Wikitree). Ashton lived at Chatterton Plantation on the Potomac River in King George County; the property is about five miles east of Passapatanzy.

Deyo doesn't give us a complete list of the people who made land deals with Wahanganoche.  Encyclopedia Virginia says that the Patawomeck chief allowed Gerrard Fowke to patent 3,000 acres in 1655, with similar permission granted to Giles Brent. Bill Deyo doesn't claim that Fowke and Brent were Wahanganoche's sons-in-law; on the contrary, he reports (correctly) that they were the perpetrators of Wahanganoche's 1662 arrest. I can't find any record of the 3000-acre land deal, but the records do indicate that Fowke had a land dispute with Wahanganoche; the March 1662 Assembly report says "it is ordered by the assembly that all differences of land between collonel Gerrard ffowke and the Wahanganoche king of the Potowmeck Indians be referred to such persons as the governour shall commissionate" (VA Genweb, transcript page 16).

Fowke isn't the only one who had a land dispute with Wahanganoche. HMDB says that in 1658, "Capt. Giles Brent had a dispute with Chief Wahanganoche of the Patawomecks over land. Brent was ordered by the court to give up lands in Westmoreland County, a section that is now Stafford County, to the chief."

We don't know whether any of Wahanganoche's land sales were a voluntary transaction or if the pressures on him were so great that a sale was his best option. The tribe was in trouble at this time. He could have been threatened with violence; maybe he needed to bribe a few Englishmen to get their help; maybe he needed to raise some cash; or maybe he thought that selling the land and getting something for it was better than having it taken from him by force. By 1662 the tribe probably knew that doom was staring them in the face, and they had to make accommodations with the English if they wanted to survive.

OK, now the misrepresentation of the facts has gotten really egregious. It is documented that Meese married a woman named Ann Pert in Essex, England in 1675 and had four children with her, all born in England after 1675 (Wikitree).  These are the only children named in Meese's will, and there is no record of them ever leaving England. It is documented that the real Anne Meese never married at all and is buried in England (Wikitree); her brother Henry died in England in 1720 (Wikitree); and it's not clear what became of siblings John and Francis.

Robert Pettus is the alleged son of Thomas Pettus and Ka-Okee, but Deyo says little about him and no one else seems to take Robert and his daughter Rebecca very seriously.

There is a note on Geni's Henry Meese profile arguing that "there is not a slight chance that this Col Meese is the same who married Ann Pert in England." The argument is made that the "real" Henry Meese of Virginia is mentioned in the will of his grandson John Crafford/Crawford, but this is not accurate. Virginia Historical Genealogies has excerpts from the will and some information on the line of descent. Geni and Wikitree confirm this information and add more. The grandmother mentioned in the Crafford will was Mary Ann Grigsby, not Mary Ontonah; all her children were through her first husband Benjamin Newton, although her second husband was John Meese (not Henry Meese). John Crafford was the husband of Mary's granddaughter, not an actual grandson.

One of the notes on Geni's Henry Meese profile seems to think it's significant that there is no ship manifest showing that Meese returned to England, but also acknowledges that no death date can be found for this alternate-history Meese who stayed in Virginia.

We have convincing evidence that Henry Meese returned to England. From the Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography page 1366:

"[Description of Meese's Virginia activity in 1666-1667]... On March 14, 1678-79, the King ordered that Meese be added to the council, and his commission was dated May 10, 1680, but on Dec 12, 1681, Lord Culpeper wrote that he had appointed a councillor in the place of Col. Henry Meese, who was living in England."

There can be no doubt that this is the correct Meese. The dates are odd though, since we have no record of Meese returning to Virginia after 1675. But it's possible that he did; Wikitree says he apparently traveled back to England sometime between 1655 and 1661, then returned to the colonies. Slow communication is another possible explanation; the king may have belatedly received a request to appoint Meese to the council and granted it, unaware that Meese had already returned to England; and more time passed before Lord Culpeper responded. British History Online has Lord Culpeper's letter (December 12 entry, paragraph 319), and Culpeper explains that his difficult voyage to the West Indies caused a delay of several months.  Culpeper also appointed a replacement on the council for Rowland Place, another Virginia settler who had returned to England.  Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography page 133-134 says that Place had been reappointed to the council on the same date that Meese was appointed; but Place had gone back to England the previous year, and never returned to Virginia.

The Archives of Maryland have a three page letter written in December 1681 to Col. Henry Meese, Merchant in London by Philip Calvert, Chancellor of Maryland. The letter is mainly concerned with events in Maryland in 1659 and 1660 (when Henry Meese was in the colony), but Calvert acknowledges receiving letters from Meese in 1681; clearly, Meese hadn't lost touch with his colonial connections. This continued contact may have been related to his business interests; Indian Reservations says that after returning to London, Meese imported large amounts of tobacco from Virginia, which he re-exported to continental Europe. He also exported manufactured goods to Virginia.

A more realistic explanation is that some people had left the Indian community and started working for the English as servants (not slaves) before the war, out of economic necessity or good self-preservation instincts. These people would not have been targeted during the war. The English had been encroaching on Patawomeck lands for more than a decade before the war, and it wasn't hard to predict which side would win in the end. The English didn't want "wild" Indians on their land, but tame ones were OK. Wikitree reports that Meese applied for court for permission to employ an Indian in 1667, proving that (1) Meese knew at least one Indian, and (2) there was a route for Indians to find work as hired servants in the English community.

Another alternative is that tribe members who were sold into slavery during the war were later freed, which could have happened in just a few years if a 1670 law was obeyed. The 1666 war declaration called for "their women and children and their goods or as much of it as shall be taken to be disposed of [sold] according to such instructions as shall be issued from the Right Honourable the Governor." Once enslaved, the women would be subject to sexual abuse by their English masters, leading to a mixed-race community. According to HMDB, a historical marker erected by the Patawomeck Tribe in 2014 and authored by Bill Deyo confirms that the women and children were captured as slaves. It also repeats Deyo's princess marriage hypothesis, but what else would we expect?

Encyclopedia Virginia relates the sordid history of Indian slavery in Virginia, and says "Laws allowing Indian war prisoners to be enslaved were enacted in 1660, 1668, and 1676. A law requiring Indian war captives to be servants and not slaves was passed in 1670 but largely ignored." Explore History provides clarification of the 1670 law, saying that boys and girls were to be freed at age 30, and adult men and women were to serve for 12 years. This law was repealed in 1682, making lifetime slavery permissible again, and then the 1682 law was reversed in 1683. Legal confusion continued to prevail. According to Encyclopedia Virginia, it was not until 1806 that a court case "finally provided a lasting declaration that Indians would be a free class of people, and that freedom would be based upon proof of Indian maternity." 

Pettus, Meese and Ashton were wealthy, prominent men whose social standing among the English would have been badly damaged by marrying an Indian. What would these men have to gain by marrying into an unwanted, outnumbered, declining Indian tribe? The short answer is "nothing". Land? It was easy to acquire land under the English system. The English in general didn't like the Indians, so Indian land would only be desirable if the Indians could be pushed off of it first.  Protection from Indian raids? The English were more powerful than the Indians, and the wealthy could staff their plantations with well-armed men if the Indian community was too close for comfort. The desire to switch cultures and live like an Indian? These men clearly didn't do that. Love? Given the hostility and physical separation between the communities, it's not clear how these men could have even met their Indian princesses.  The men were a good "catch" in the English community due to their high social standing, and shouldn't have much trouble finding an English bride if they wanted to marry.

It might have been beneficial to Wahanganoche to marry his female relatives to influential Englishmen, if the Englishmen would then use their influence to protect the Indians.  But would they want to do this?  If the marriages alone weren't enough to destroy their social standing, continuing to act like an "Indian lover" might make them very unpopular among their fellow Englishmen. Bacon's Rebellion broke out in 1676 because some colonists thought the governor wasn't tough enough on the Indians (Historic Jamestowne).

The Pocahontas-John Rolfe union is the only political marriage that has any documentation behind it, and Wahanganoche hadn't even been born yet when that went down.

Changing the subject:

Our Patawomeck Ancestors says "It is important to note that the famous Matoaka portrait of Pocahontas was found in England in a Pettus home!" That might be significant if it was true, but it's apparently wrong. There were two portraits that can be connected to the Rolfe family, which is legitimately related to Pocahontas. Apparently there are only four significant portraits, and none of them belonged to the Pettus family. There's a 1616 engraving by Simon van de Passe that's believed to be the only image taken from life. It was created for a book, not for hanging on walls. Engravings have their limitations, and it's not a flattering picture. There's another engraving that's a slightly prettied-up version of the first one, and the Booton Hall portrait which is an oil-painting version of the engravings, enhanced to make it look more lifelike. All three have an oval "frame" around the portrait that mentions Mataoka.

Booton Hall belongs to the Elwin family, which is related to the Rolfes. There are some claims of Elwins being descended from John Rolfe and Pocahontas, although this seems to be disputed. Finally there is the Sedgeford portrait, which is in a very different style than the others. It was purchased by a member of the Rolfe family in the belief that it was Pocahontas, but it's now believed to be the wife and child of Seminole chief Osceola.

Christian Martin Waddington and her unidentified sisterr

Christian Waddington was a real person (Wikitree). Her parents and maiden name are unknown, and there's nothing to suggest a connection to Thomas Pettus and/or Ka-Okee. She testified that she was fifty years old in a 1687 court case, giving her an estimated birthdate of 1637. At this time, many people had only a vague idea of how old they were, so her actual birthdate could be a few years before or after this. A separate court case in 1730 (about 30 years after Christian's death) also talks about her. This court testimony is apparently the only documentation we have for Christian Waddington.

There is no indication that she had any Indian ancestry. She apparently lived as an Englishwoman in the English community, which gave her the opportunity and the social standing to meet and marry her two English husbands.  If she grew up in the Patawomeck community at Passapatanzy as indicated by Bill Deyo, it would have been difficult for her to meet and marry an Englishman. We do not know whether she was Virginia-born, or if she came to Virginia as an immigrant. If Christian grew up in the English community, then her unidentified sister probably did too. If the sister grew up in the English community, it would have been difficult for her to meet and marry an Indian.

Wikitree has the court testimony that is Christian's biggest claim to fame. The testimony is rather confusing, but it looks like Ann McPherson was Christian's daughter by first husband John Martin. The mother's sister that Ann is talking about is the sister of Christian. Frances Golber was Christian's niece, and her unnamed mother is Christian's sister. There's little information on Frances Golber, and it's not clear whether Golber was her maiden name or her married name. It does say that she later married Thomas White, so Golber might have been her maiden name.  If so, that doesn't help the Ka-Okee myth at all. Francis Waddington was Ann's stepfather.

As a reminder, the storyline is that Ka Okee married Thomas Pettus around 1636 and gave birth to two daughters, Christian and Unknown, with Christian apparently being the eldest. Ka-Okee evidently died sometime before 1643, since it's documented that Thomas Pettus had married someone else by 1643.

It's documented that Christian (born 1637) married John Martin and then Francis Waddington. It's reported that Unknown (apparently born after 1637) married Chief Wahanganoche and gave birth to Keziah Arroyah and Mary Ontonah. Given the limitations of nature, it doesn't look like Keziah and Mary could have been born any earlier than 1650.

Keziah was reportedly married first to a William Redman whose existence has not been documented (Wikitree) and then to a Richard Bryant (1615-1680) whose existence has also not been documented (Wikitree), and gave birth to the documented Richard Bryant (1651-1704) (Wikitree), when according to the timeline Keziah could not be more than one year old at the time of her son's birth, or maybe hadn't been born yet.

The documented Richard Bryant married a woman named Ann around 1680; her maiden name and parents are unknown, but her birthdate can be reasonably estimated as before 1655 (Wikitree). According to Deyo, Ann was the daughter of Henry Meese and Mary Ontonah. There's a big problem with this timeline too. In 1655, Henry Meese hadn't yet come to Virginia or made his alleged marriage to Mary Ontonah, who would have been five years old at the most in 1655. So Ann "Meese" was born at least five years before her parents met. If it was possible for any of this to be true, the Richard Bryant-Ann Meese union would have been a first-cousin marriage.

Indian Reservations says that an alternate version of the story has evolved, in which Ka-Okee never married Thomas Pettus; instead, she married Wahanganoche, and Keziah was the daughter of this marriage (not Ka-Okee's granddaughter as Deyo claims). This presumably applies to Mary Ontonah too.  This makes a lot more sense than Deyo's story and allows a much earlier birthdate for Keziah and Mary, but there's no documentation or oral tradition to support it. It's as fictional-looking as anything else. Bill Deyo specifically denies that Keziah is the daughter of Ka-Okee. The reason for this is obvious; his whole line of reasoning is based on Christian "Pettus" being the ancestor of the Martin family. If Ka-Okee didn't marry Thomas Pettus and give birth to Christian, the Martin family loses their line of descent from Pocahontas.

I don't use "it's not impossible" as the standard for accepting the validity of a line of descent. It's not impossible that Ka-Okee was a real person who married Thomas Pettus and that Christian is their daughter. There is no convincing evidence that it's true and plenty of reason to think that it's wrong, but we can't rule it out. 

But according to Bill Deyo's version of history, it IS impossible that Keziah is the mother of the documented Richard Bryant, and that Mary is the mother of Richard's documented wife Ann.

It's true that the documented wife of Dr. Richard Bryant, Anne Unknown, was previously married and had a son named William Redman or Redmond (Wikitree). But this Anne was clearly not the daughter of Henry Meese, and there is no indication that she or her first husband had Indian ancestry.  There seems to be little documentation for her son William Redman, and we don't even know the first husband's  name. However, there was a documented English immigrant named John Redman who married in Virginia in 1655 and produced children (Colonial Settlers), so there might be a connection to this family. 

I wish they'd stop doing this to me.

The Elkins family

Deyo has Genealogical articles about the Jett, Elkins, Monteith, Finall, Newton and Sullivan families. I'm descended from the Elkins family myself, so only that family will be discussed here.

Deyo's Elkins article begins with a rehash of the dubious claims about Henry Meese and Peter Ashton that have already been dismissed. He states correctly that Ralph Elkins (1636-1690) was the first member of the Elkins family in Stafford County, and his wife was Mary Ashton, who may have been the sister of Peter Ashton. There is no doubt that Peter Ashton knew the Elkins family, but his precise relationship to Elkins' wife can't be determined.

Deyo continues:

"Other children by Richard’s wife, Mary Williams, appear to include... a traditional daughter, Catherine Elkins (wife of William Redman, the stepson of Dr. Richard Bryant, the father of Richard Elkins’ second wife)."

Catherine's existence is doubtful. A note on Geni says “I have never seen the name of William Redman's wife, Catherine, in any official records. As far as I know, it is only a traditional name. It could, therefore, have been Elizabeth or Ann. I think that some people have incorrectly abstracted records of the Bryant family to obtain the name of Elizabeth for Miss Elkins.” We established earlier that Richard Bryant's wife Anne Unknown had a son named William Redman from a previous marriage, with no indication that she or her first husband had any Indian ancestry. Contrary to Deyo's claims, she can not be the daughter of Henry Meese and Mary Ontonah. There doesn't seem to be any record of Bryant stepson William Redman beyond a mention in his stepfather's will. There was an all-English Redman family in Virginia that could have produced more than one descendant named William Redman. If a William Redman really did marry an Elkins daughter, we can't tell whether he's the same person as Richard Bryant's stepson.  A 1999 note on Genealogy.com by Bill Deyo himself expresses doubt that there was a Redman/Elkins marriage, but it's possible that he found more information later.

Once again, this is accurate except for the part about Ann being the daughter of Henry Meese, and the part about Richard Bryant being the son of Keziah Arroyah.

It is probably true that this younger Ralph Elkins is the son of Richard Elkins. There seems to be little documentation for Richard's younger children, so it's not clear where the list of children on online trees comes from. An alternative is that Ralph is Richard's nephew; it's reported that Richard Elkins had three brothers, but little is known about them and we can't tell whether one of them could have been the father of this Ralph.  Wikitree shows that Richard Elkins and William Brown were witnesses to the last will of Robert Gallop; William Brown was the brother of Maxfield Brown, father-in-law of Ralph Elkins. The families obviously knew each other. If Ralph is Richard's son, it is not clear whether Ralph's mother is first wife Mary Williams or second wife Elizabeth Bryant, but Elizabeth Bryant seems more likely.

Digression: Deyo's Elkins article says that the land that Peter's brother James Ashton left to Richard Elkins "adjoined the land of John Grigsby, who had been transported to Virginia by Col. Peter Ashton and was traditionally a son in law of Chief Wahanganoche." Is there no end to the sons-in-law of Wahanganoche? I am not descended from John Grigsby and therefore not inclined to study his personal history, but it's likely that this claim suffers from the same defects as all the other English-Patawomeck marriage claims. Wikitree says that Grigsby came to Virginia in 1662. Wahanganoche was far from home at this time, having been arrested by the English with a trial that concluded in March 1662.  Wahanganoche died in 1663 on his way home from the trial, so it's not clear when he would have had the opportunity to introduce Grigsby to his daughter. Wikitree also says that Grigsby's wife was English immigrant Sarah Jane Rosser. Geni's profile for Mary Ann Grigsby Meese (daughter of John the Immigrant and his wife Sarah Rosser) has a note on it saying that Mary is not the daughter of Wahanganoche; perhaps she was originally listed as John's wife rather than his daughter.

But if Henry Meese didn't have any legitimate children in Virginia, how did Mary Ann Grigsby Meese get her married name? It seems that very little is known about her husband, John Meese, but both Geni and Wikitree agree that he had no children with Mary Ann; all her children were with her first husband. Virginia Historical Genealogies shows that the spelling of the name varied between Ameese and Meese, with Ameese being more common (it also says that John Meese MAY have been a son of Henry Meese, not that he definitely was). "Ameese" is a peculiar way to vary an English name; documented English-sounding variations include Mace and Mosse, and Bill Deyo presents the name Mays as a variation. One possibility of course is that this is an English family with a similar name, and any Patawomeck ancestry in the family came from a different ancestor. There are other ways that a person of Patawomeck ancestry could have acquired the name. After the destruction of the tribe in 1666, the survivors had to integrate with the English population as best they could, and adopting an English-sounding first and last name would be part of the process.  "Ameese" could be a Native word that morphed into Meese; or they may taken a variation of the Meese name since it was already familiar to them. It's possible that Henry Meese had illegitimate children in Virginia. At this time it was customary for out of wedlock children to take their mother's surname; but some improvisation was necessary if mother didn't have a surname.  It's reported that Meese asked for court permission to hire an Indian servant in 1667, so he had at least a little bit of contact with the Indian community. 

Based on the little that I can see, the claims of DNA proof are not convincing. If the line of descent according to Bill Deyo is correct, there are 15 generations between me and my "ancestor" Pocahontas.  That's about four generations per century, which is reasonable, so this discussion will use 15 generations as a typical distance between Pocahontas and a modern descendant. It's possible for a DNA segment of significant size to persist this long, but it's not the norm. If you want to shorten the number of generations to 10 or 12, it doesn't make much difference to the discussion. That is still more generations than genetic genealogy can usually handle.

Finding evidence for common descent from an ancestor this distant is a very daunting project. You have to find DNA matches where the ancestor of interest is the most recent common ancestor. The probability of a DNA match with a tenth cousin is 0.002% (1 in 50,000) (ISOGG Wiki). The Pocahontas project is looking for matches at about the 14th cousin level (13th cousin if you're just looking for Ka-Okee), and the odds are much worse at that level. You'd need a vast sample size (probably millions) of people who legitimately descend from Pocahontas to find a few who received the same segment from her. It's not enough to find random people who match on any given segment; the matches need to have well-documented trees that lead back to Pocahontas and exclude the possibility that some other shared ancestor provided the segment. The further you go back in time, the harder it is to accurately document all your lines, and the more likely it is that you will share more than one common ancestor. Maybe a genetic archaeologist could pull off a project like this if they had genetic samples from the early 1600s, but an amateur genetic genealogist is pretty much doomed to fail (whether or not they realize that they've failed).

The project website shows only 9 participants in the project. The site displays the Gedmatch kit numbers for the participants, so anyone with a Gedmatch account can go in and take a look a these kits. Only one participant (the project manager) has posted a family tree, so the other 8 participants can't use Gedmatch to look for DNA matches who have the relevant ancestors in their tree.  It looks like the research on the 8 participants with no tree was limited to looking for chromosomes that carried Native American DNA. This is ethnicity identification; it can tell you that you probably descend from a specific population (the general Native American population in this case), but it can't tell you that you descend from a specific individual within that population. At present it is not possible to identify DNA as coming from a specific Native American tribe, because nobody has the database information to do that. Many tribes actively refuse to participate in DNA projects because they're afraid that the information might be used against them later on.

"Wahanganoche, who would have succeeded his father as Lesser Chief. As the Great King of Patawomeck was still alive, Wahanganoche would not have inherited that position until after his death, which likely occurred on 22 May 1623 at the famous Poison Plot, in which Dr. John Pott prepared a poison punch that killed over 200 Indians at Patawomeck, including many chiefs. Wahanganoche is believed to have also been the young King of Patawomeck when Father Andrew White visited in March of 1634. Since he was still under age at that time, he had a guardian named Archihu, who was his uncle. Since Archihu had not inherited the kingship, he was evidently an uncle by marriage to a deceased sister of Wahanganoche mother of the royal blood. Wahanganoche was still probably a boy in his late teens by 1634 but would soon take over sole responsibility of the Patawomeck Tribe as an adult king. There were probably several others who would have been in line for the position of the Great King at the time he inherited it, but it is likely that most of the adults died from Dr. Pott’s poison punch."

"Whereas the inhabitants of his Majesties colonies have several times in these four year last past been barbarously murdered by the indians and contrary to several articles of peace concluded on between us and them, and whereas we have frequently demanded satisfaction from them for their several breaches of the said peace but hitherto without such effect as we might in justice expect, It is therefore ordered for revenge of the former and for the prevention of future mischiefs that the towns of Monzation, Nanzimond and Port Tobacco with the whole nation of the Doegs and Potomacks, be forthwith prosecuted with war to their utter destruction if possible, and that their women and children and their goods or as much of it as shall be taken to be disposed of according to such instructions as shall be issued from the Right Honourable the Governor."

About 1596-1598 Pocahontas is born

1607 The first English settlers arrive in Jamestown, Virginia. From the start, both the English and Indian cultures frown on intermarriage, and their attitude never really improves.  

1607-1610 Pocahontas is involved in interactions with the English. The relationship between the communities is rather hostile.  

1610 Pocahontas marries Kocoum. Her contact with the English ends.

1611-1612 Ka-Okee is born

1613 Pocahontas is captured by the English at Passapatanzy with the collusion of a few members of the Patawomeck tribe. She is initially held for ransom.

1614 Pocahontas converts to Christianity and marries John Rolfe. There was a great deal of politicking involved in this match, aimed at ending several years of warfare and improving community relations. The marriage does lead to eight years of peace between the Indian and English communities, but the cultural relationship deteriorates after that and doesn’t recover.

1615 Pocahontas’ son Thomas Rolfe is born

1616 The Rolfe family travels to England on a promotional tour. Pocahontas is treated like a celebrity at the highest levels of society.

1617 The Rolfe family sets sail for Virginia, but Pocahontas suddenly falls ill before the ship reaches the open ocean. She dies in England.

1622 An Indian uprising wipes out a third of the English colonists, putting an end to the idea of peaceful coexistence. Ten years of warfare follow.

abt 1622 Wahanganoche is born.

1632 A peace agreement calls for a racial separation policy, with separate territories for the English and the Indians. The vast majority of Indians are permanently excluded from English land.

1634 The English build a wooden wall along the boundary between English and Indian lands

Date unknown Thomas Pettus arrives in Virginia. The estimates range from 1630 to 1641, with 1638-1641 being the most popular date. He was definitely there by 1642.

About 1635 Ka-Okee marries Thomas Pettus, who may not have arrived in Virginia yet. The estimates for the wedding date range from 1631 to 1645, but the established birthdate of their “daughter” Christian Waddington suggests that the wedding date shouldn’t be later than 1636. They reportedly live deep in Indian territory as Wahanganoche's next-door neighbors in Passapatanzy.

1637 Christian Waddington (alleged daughter of Thomas Pettus and Ka-Okee) is born.

After 1637 a second daughter (Unknown Pettus) is born to Thomas Pettus and Ka-Okee.

1642 The presence of Thomas Pettus in Virginia is recorded for the first time.

1642 to 1660 Thomas Pettus is a member of the prestigious Virginia Governor’s Council

Before 1643 Ka-Okee is apparently dead, leaving Thomas Pettus free to remarry.

Before 1643 Thomas Pettus marries Englishwoman Elizabeth Freeman Durant.

1644 An Indian uprising kills a significant number of English settlers, followed by two years of war.  Community relations worsen.

1646 A peace treaty sets up a new apartheid arrangement. Members of one community can only set foot on the other one's land under limited conditions, with severe penalties for violations.

After 1650 Peter Ashton arrives in Virginia. The first record of him is in 1654.

After 1650 Christian “Pettus” marries her first husband John Martin. Their first documented child is born around 1660, so it seems likely that the marriage date is closer to 1660 than to 1650.

After 1650 Unknown Pettus marries Chief Wahanganoche and gives birth to two daughters, Keziah Arroyah and Mary Ontonah Wahanganoche

1651 Keziah Arroyah marries Richard Bryant and gives birth to their first son.  She can not be more than one year old at the time, and may not have actually been born yet.

1650s English encroachment on Patawomeck land begins, leading to conflict and violence that continues through 1666.

1652 Thomas Pettus receives a land grant from the colonial government near the Patawomeck village of Passapatanzy, roughly 80 miles from Jamestown. This land is re-granted to him in 1658.

1655 or earlier Birth of Ann, alleged daughter of Henry Meese and Mary Ontonah Wahanganoche. Meese hadn't yet come to Virginia or made his alleged marriage to Mary Ontonah, who would have been about five years old at the time of Ann's birth.

1660 Henry Meese comes to Virginia.

1660-1662 Henry Meese marries Mary Ontonah Wahanganoche, granddaughter of Ka-Okee. She can not be more than 10 or 12 years old at the time, probably less.

Before 1662 Peter Ashton marries a daughter of Wahanganoche who is sometimes called Grace.

1662 Wahanganoche is arrested by the English and put on trial for his life. He confirms the sale of land to Henry Meese and Peter Ashton; the actual sales may have been at an earlier date. Deyo interprets these sales as evidence of a family relationship, but other explanations seem more likely.

1663 Wahanganoche dies, reportedly murdered by the English on the way home from the trial.

1665 Thomas Pettus sells his Passapatanzy land to Henry Meese, who is also buying parcels from other landowners in the area.

1666 The English launch a war of "utter destruction" against the Patawomeck and Doeg tribes. The men are killed, the women and children are sold into slavery, and the Patawomeck tribe ceases to exist as a functioning cultural entity. It wasn't the final end of the Indian troubles, since some tribes still remained viable. But the Patawomeck were finished.

The Martin line:
1. Pocahontas m. Kocoum 1610>
2. Ka-Okee b. abt 1611 m. Thomas Pettus abt 1635>
3. Christian Pettus b. 1637 m. 1. Martin 2. Waddington>
More plausibly, Christian Unknown b. 1637 (probably not a Pettus, probably 100% English) m. 1. Martin 2. Waddington>
4. the Martin line 

The Bryant line:
1. Pocahontas m. Kocoum 1610>
2. Ka-Okee b. abt 1611 m. Thomas Pettus abt 1635>
3. Unknown Pettus b. aft 1636 m. Wahanganoche abt 1650>
4. Keziah Arroyah b. abt 1650 m. Richard Bryant Senior abt 1650>
5. Dr. Richard Bryant b. abt 1651 m. Anne Meese b. before 1655, his first cousin, abt 1680.  
More plausibly, Dr. Richard Bryant b. abt 1651 m. Anne Unknown b. before 1655 (probably an Englishwoman, definitely not the daughter of Henry Meese) abt 1680>
6. the Bryant line

Genetic genealogy seeks to confirm your line of descent by identifying the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) that you share with your DNA matches. The number of ancestors doubles in every generation. You have 2 ancestors at the first generation level, your parents. There are 4 at the second generation (your grandparents); 8 at the third generation (your great-grandparents); and so on. You are expected to share a lot of DNA with a full sibling; not as much, but still a lot, with a first cousin; and less than that with a second cousin.  You will usually share some DNA with a third cousin, but at this point it becomes possible to not match them at all. Fourth cousins will share your DNA more than half the time, but there will also be a lot of fourth cousins who don't match you. The probability of a DNA match with an eighth cousin is less than 1%. ISOGG Wiki has information on the probabilities for different degrees of cousinhood. A different ISOGG Wiki page has information on the average amount of shared DNA for different relationships, and the minimum-maximum range.

DNA Inheritance. You get half your DNA from your father and half from your mother.  But each of your parents got half their DNA from their mother and half from their father; so the DNA you got from your parents came from all four of your grandparents.  But it doesn't stop there; each of your grandparents got half of their DNA from their father and half from their mother; you got DNA from all your great-grandparents, and your great-great-grandparents, and from many of your ancestors for a few generations beyond that. DNA flows down from the older generations to the younger generations, and the descendant carries recognizable DNA from several previous generations. 

Every time a child is born, the mother gives it half her DNA and the father gives it half his DNA, because it takes two halves to make a whole (the child).  So in every generation, half of the DNA from the "upstream" ancestors gets filtered out. After about 7 generations, the DNA from the oldest generation usually decreases so much that it basically disappears. But occasionally it sticks around longer than that.

You get exactly 50% of your DNA from each parent, but you don't get exactly 25% from each grandparent. The DNA recombines (shuffles) when it splits in half to go into an egg or sperm, and the recombination process is fairly random. So you can get more from one grandparent and less from another.  For example, the 50% of your DNA that came from your father might contain 20% from his father and 30% from his mother; and the 50% that you got from your mother might contain 26% from her father and 24% from her mother. It's similar with the previous generations; a segment from a specific ancestor does not get neatly cut in half with each new generation. A surprisingly large segment (or even an entire chromosome) can pass down intact for several generations, or it might disappear completely at the first opportunity. Because the amount you receive from previous generations isn't exactly equal, the DNA from one ancestor might be carried down for more generations than the DNA from a different ancestor.

The process of using your DNA matches to home in on a specific common ancestor is called triangulation. This may or may not include identifying the specific segments that you share with the match. Identification of specific segments is done with a tool called a chromosome browser, and all the major DNA companies (except Ancestry) provide one. An excellent free site called DNA Painter lets you map your DNA segments onto a chart, to help you identify which ancestor provided which segment. Some DNA companies provide information on genetic clusters; a cluster is a group of people who share the same DNA segment.  A small to medium-sized cluster indicates that you probably share a common ancestor within the last 7 generations more or less. A gigantic cluster is probably a useless pileup region.  The Leeds Method is a technique for separating your DNA matches into clusters for each grandparent without the use of a chromosome browser.

With a full sibling, the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) is your parents. A DNA match in the expected range is evidence that you do indeed share the same parents. But it tells you nothing about the generations before your parents. With a first cousin, the MRCA is your grandparents; an appropriate-sized match with a first cousin is evidence that you really do have the same grandparents, and that your parent and the cousin's parent really are siblings. For information on your great-grandparents, you need an appropriate match with a second cousin. And so on up the line. To find evidence on the validity of more distant ancestors, you have to find matches with more distant cousins. Notice that all of these matches are evidence, not proof. If all the matches make the same mistake about the name of the MRCA, you'll have information on your relationship to an ancestor; but you'll still have the wrong name.

Identifiable DNA from a specific ancestor tends to wash out of the descendants after 5 to 7 generations, and after that you might not carry any DNA at all from the ancestor in question. But you may carry a segment that's much older than this. It's possible for a significant-sized segment to persist for 10-20 generations, but this is the exception not the rule. Sometimes the DNA washes out earlier too; there's no guarantee that you will have carry the DNA of an ancestor who's 6 generations upstream of you.

Match size and segment size. Size matters when it comes to DNA matches. DNA segments are measured in units called centimorgans (cM, with the "M" capitalized to distinguish it from centimeters). The total combined length of our chromosomes is about 3400cM not including the X; there's no agreement about the exact amount. That's actually 3400cM from each parent, but we typically talk about the 3400cM as if it was a single chromosome, not a pair.

Close matches like siblings and first cousins are expected to share many segments, and some of the segments will be large. The number of shared segments decreases as the relationship becomes more distant, and the segment size also tends to decrease.  When you reach the fourth cousin level, it's common to share just one segment - or none at all. As the segment size decreases, so does your confidence that this is a true match. It's called Identical By Descent (IBD) when you share DNA with someone because you both received the same segment from the same ancestor.  But it's also possible to have a false match where your DNA coincidentally happens to resemble someone else, who did not get their DNA from the same person that you did. This is called Identical By State (IBS).

The smaller the segment, the more likely that it is a false match. Most DNA websites do not consider someone to be a match unless the shared segment is at least 7cM. At that level, the probability of a false match is 10%  (FTDNA White Paper, page 15 [Table 2]).  A 10cM match is better; the risk of a false match is only 2%. At 14cM, the risk of a false match is close to zero. But in the 3 to 5cM range, the risk of a false match is 48%-97%. Some DNA sites will let you change the threshold from 7cM to a lower limit, but it's not recommended that you do this because the results will be so unreliable.

At the 10th generation level you are expected to have 1,024 different ancestors, and at the 15th generation level the number is 32,768.  The actual number might be a bit less than this; if there have been any cousin marriages in your line, you will have some ancestors who occupy more than one slot in your tree, so the number of unique individuals is less. This is called pedigree collapse. Pedigree collapse is not the same thing as endogamy; but a high rate of pedigree collapse can influence the expected amount of shared DNA.

Every centimorgan of DNA that you have came down to you through your 15th-generation ancestors, but the DNA from many of these 32,768 ancestors will have completely dropped out of your personal genome after 15 generations of recombination. The DNA segments from the remaining 15th-generation ancestors will mostly be so small that it's hard to distinguish true matches from the general background noise. It would be quite a trick to figure out which 15th-generation ancestor provided a given segment. [15 generations are used as an example here to fit with the discussion of the Pocahontas DNA project. Every centimorgan of DNA that you have came down through all your other ancestors too.]

Endogamy and pileup regions. There are certain situations that can raise the threshold where we can feel confident about the size of a match.  

Endogamy is a situation where the members of a relatively small, closed community have intermarried with each other for so many generations that everyone in the population shares a lot of the same DNA whether they are closely related or not. Each person may be descended many times from the same ancestor, and are the cousins of other people in the population in many different ways. Their shared DNA is considerably higher than what you'd expect considering their closest relationship, and they may share many small segments on many different chromosomes (Legacy Tree, Legacy Tree Part II). It's much more difficult to trace relationships under these circumstances, and a 7cM threshold isn't enough to determine the validity of a match.  In general, a minimum threshold of 15-20cM should be used (Your DNA Guide).

A pileup region is a DNA segment where many people have the same DNA whether they are related to each other or not.  A match in a pileup region is meaningless, unless the segment is so big that it extends into a part of the chromosome that is not in the pileup region.

X DNA, Y DNA, Mitochondrial DNA. We have 22 pairs of autosomal chromosomes, which do not have any male/female differences.  The DNA on these chromosomes is called autosomal DNA - atDNA for short.

We also have one pair of sex chromosomes, the X and the Y, which behave differently than the autosomal chromosomes. A woman has two X chromosomes (one from each parent); a man has one X chromosome (received from his mother) and one Y chromosome (received from his father). A woman gives one X chromosome to all of her children, and this X-DNA recombines before passing to the next generation just like all the other chromosomes.  A man give his X chromosome to all of his daughters and his Y chromosome to all of his sons.  The male's X and Y chromosomes do NOT recombine before passing to the next generation; they are not compatible with each other so there is nothing that they can recombine with.

Because of this inheritance pattern, X DNA can persist for up to 50% longer than autosomal DNA. The best results occur when you have a line that alternates perfectly in a mother-son-mother-son sequence for many generations, because the X will only recombine in every other generation. In an all-female line of descent, the X isn't likely to persist any longer than atDNA does. The inheritance pattern eliminates certain ancestors as potential sources of X DNA; any time a line has two males in a row, you know that the X DNA did not come from that line.  The 7cM confidence level for atDNA doesn't work for the X; the match needs to be at least 15-20cM to be significant.  Anything less than that will probably be a false match.

Since Y DNA passes down from father to son with no recombination, mutations are the only changes that occur in Y DNA over the generations. Y DNA testing lets us trace the male line of descent back for many more generations than what we can do with atDNA.

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is a special type of DNA that passes down maternally.  It is NOT carried on the X chromosome, and it does not recombine. The mutation rate for mtDNA is much slower than the mutation rate for Y DNA, which ironically limits its usefulness for genealogy. The common ancestor for an mtDNA match may have lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, far beyond our ability to actually identify her. A mother passes her mtDNA to all her children, and her daughters will transmit it to their children. But the mtDNA of her sons won't be transmitted to anyone; a man's children get their mtDNA from their mother, not from him. But men have mtDNA, and both sexes can have their mtDNA tested to get information on their matrilineal line.