Fresh detail has surfaced on the final resting place of a survivor of the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture in Bermuda, whose grave in Jamestown, Virginia, is the oldest known tombstone in the United States.

Sir George Yeardley, born in 1588 in Southwark, London, was among the 150 passengers on the flagship vessel for the Third Supply Fleet sent to the starving colony in Virginia by its founding company in London.

Originally tasked with commanding the soldiers aboard the Sea Venture, Sir George became governor of the Jamestown colony three times and was in charge when the first representative government assembly in British North America convened in July 1619.

Jamestown, Bermuda’s sister colony, was England’s first permanent settlement in the Americas.

Sir George arrived there in 1610 after the Sea Venture castaways built two smaller ships, The Patience and The Deliverance, to continue on to their original destination.

According to this month’s edition of The International Journal of Historical Archaeology, the tombstone of Sir George, who died in 1627, aged 40, has been traced to Europe after analysis of tiny fossils in the black limestone slab.

The tomb was “originally laid in the floor of Jamestown’s 1617 church”, moved in the 1640s, and its original placement lost until it was “rediscovered in 1901, repaired, and placed in the chancel of the present-day Memorial Church, constructed in 1906”.

It was traced to Sir George using a reference to it in the 1680s will of his step-grandson, Adam Thorowgood II.

Sir George was knighted in 1618 by King James I and sailed back to Virginia in 1619 as Lord Governor.

He resigned the governorship in 1621 until he was appointed Crown Governor in 1626.

From the fossil analysis, scientists determined that the tombstone had to originate in Europe — either in Ireland or Belgium — and was likely imported to Jamestown from the latter, where the black stone was popular among the wealthy to commemorate their dead.

The article, by Marcus Key Jr and Rebecca Rossi, concludes: “We hypothesise it was quarried and cut to size in Belgium, shipped down the Meuse River, across the English Channel to London, where it was carved and the brass inlays installed, and finally shipped on to Jamestown as ballast.

“This trade route was a small piece of the rapidly expanding Atlantic world of geopolitical colonial trade.”

Sir George spent ten months in Bermuda after the Sea Venture was separated from its fleet in a storm and wrecked on the reefs off the island.

The knight is among the leaders credited with Jamestown’s survival. He was a key political reformer and also one of the first English enslavers in the colony.