First Families of Virginia

[1] They descend from European colonists who primarily settled at Jamestown, Williamsburg, the Northern Neck and along the James River and other navigable waters in Virginia during the 17th century.

[2] Most First Families remained in Virginia, where they flourished as tobacco planters, and from the sale of slaves to the cotton states to the south.

They adopted modern agricultural technology and co-opted rich "Yankees" into their upper-class, rural horse-estate society.

[3] However, mirroring the fortunes of other White Anglo-Saxon Protestant social groups, the political and financial influence of the First Families in Virginia has declined over the last century.

These sorts of ties were common in the early colony, as families shuttled back and forth between England and Virginia, maintaining their connections with the mother country and with each other.

A thin network of increasingly interrelated families made up the planter elite and held power in colonial Virginia.

In a pre-Revolutionary War economy dependent on the production of tobacco as a commodity crop, the ownership of the best land was tightly controlled.

[5] Educated among the English of Virginia and converted to Christianity during her captivity in Henricus, Pocahontas married colonist John Rolfe at a church in Jamestown on April 5, 1614.

Rolfe had become prominent and wealthy as the first to successfully develop an export cash crop for the colony with new varieties of tobacco.

By virtue of many fictional accounts, her marriage was romanticized and became part of the mythology of early American history.

So great was the importance of Pocahontas in these family trees that, upon the passage of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, First Family lobbying resulted in the "Pocahontas Exception", which allowed white people claiming native descent to circumvent the Act's one-drop rule and remain classified as white.

[8] In 1887, following the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, Virginia Governor Wyndham Robertson wrote the first history of Pocahontas and her descendants, delineating the ancestry of FFV families including the Bollings, Clements, Whittles, Blands, Skipwiths, Flemings, Catletts, Gays, Jordans, Randolphs, Tazewells, and many others.