He was the husband of Eleanor White, whom he married at St Bride's Church[1] in London, and the father of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in America.

Very little is known of Dare other than the birth of his child, but his father-in-law, John White, was appointed Governor during the second attempt to settle Sir Walter Raleigh's Roanoke colony in 1587.

The following is an exact quote from the abbreviated entry: So that immediately the children of the missing persons from the Colony were placed into respective guardianships, and all of them were eventually declared dead by the Prerogative or other appropriate court.

In Charles Edward Banks, The Planters of the Commonwealth (1930, 1st edition) there is an important mention of a vessel by the name of Mary & John that the same above-mentioned Rev.

She suggests that this might be why the colonists, two of whom were pregnant women and several of whom were parents with young children, were willing to undertake the dangerous journey to Roanoke Island with low supplies and at a time England was on the verge of war with Spain.

The colonists, including the women, signed a petition urging White to return to England for supplies, even though he was reluctant to leave his daughter and granddaughter.

William Strachey, a secretary of the Jamestown Colony, wrote in his The History of Travel Into Virginia Britania in 1612 that, at the Indian settlements of Peccarecanick and Ochanahoen, there were reportedly two story houses with stone walls.

[5] Strachey wrote in 1612 that four English men, two boys, and one girl had been sighted at the Eno settlement of Ritanoc, under the protection of a chief called Eyanoco.

[8] In 1701, surveyor John Lawson encountered members of the Hatteras tribe living on Roanoke Island who claimed some of their ancestors were white people.