Pocahontas's son inherited Virginia land, and Virginia's 1924 race law made an exception that kept families claiming descent from her legally white

Pocahontas, called Rebecca in England, fell ill in March 1617 aboard a ship at Gravesend, about to sail home, and died. She was buried in the chancel of St George's church on 21 March 1617; the register calls her "Rebecca Wrolfe, wyffe of Thomas Rolfe gent", naming the wrong husband. The church burned in 1727 and her grave has never been found, despite a search by a Virginian in 1923. Her husband John Rolfe left their son Thomas, aged about two, in England and died in 1622. The National Park Service says Powhatan left Thomas thousands of acres on the James River, including the Varina plantation, and that John Rolfe secured them by royal patent. Thomas came to Virginia in 1635 and asked permission in 1641 to visit his mother's people; he met his uncle Opechancanough. Thomas's daughter Jane married Robert Bolling in 1675. Many influential Virginia families claimed descent from Pocahontas. On 20 March 1924 Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act, banning interracial marriage and defining a white person as having no non-white ancestry, except that a person with one-sixteenth or less American Indian ancestry still counted as white. The registrar Walter Plecker then rewrote Indian birth records as "colored". The Supreme Court struck down the marriage ban in Loving v. Virginia in 1967.