Mother of Nicketti

Leona M. Simonini claimed this (name unknown) woman was the daughter of "Cleopatra", of the Powhatan by her uncle, Opechancanough "Mangopeesomon", paramount chief of the Powhatan, and that she had a daughter Nicketti by a chieftain of the Cayugas tribe.

Historian Helen C. Rountree wrote:

Princess Nicketti is the name given to a Virginia Indian woman believed by some to have been the daughter of Opechancanough, a leader of the Powhatan Indians and the brother of the paramount chief Powhatan. While the name has been referenced almost exclusively on twenty-first-century genealogy websites by people claiming family relationship, no scholarly evidence exists that Princess Nicketti ever lived. A careful search of seventeenth-century records in Virginia yields no one by that name, male or female. And no name of a child of Opechancanough was ever recorded in that century. The writings about her stem from a single published source: Alexander Brown's genealogy The Cabells and Their Kin (1939). Significantly, Brown calls Nicketti's story only a "very interesting tradition" and adds, "I cannot vouch for it[s accuracy]," but he had heard about her from several prominent Piedmont Virginia families. Subsequent writers have quoted Brown's text as fact.

References

• an alternate ancestry of Nicketti proposed here: Vest, Jay Hansford C. "Mormons and Indians in Central Virginia: J. Golden Kimball and the Mason Family's Native American Origins." Journal of Mormon History 40, no. 3 (2014): 127-54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24243806 link to page 134
• https://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=stevensp&id=I00715 cites Leona M. Simonini and calls her “Granddaughter and Niece of Chief Powhatan”
• Rountree, Helen C. The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989.
• Brown, Alexander. The Cabells and Their Kin. Richmond, Va.: Garrett and Massie, Inc., 1939.
• Biographical Genealogies of the Kentucky-Virginia Floyd Families, N. J. Floyd, 1912