Life History

Notes

• --------------------------------
  Augustine, second son of Lawrence Washington and Mildred Warner, married for his second wife,  Mary Ball; their oldest son was George Washington (President of the United States); their only daughter, Betty Washington, was the second wife of Colonel Fielding Lewis, by whom she had a numerous progeny, notable in themselves and their descendants.
  
  Mildred, the only daughter of Lawrence Washington and Mildred Warner, married, first, Roger Gregory, by whom she had three daughters, Mildred, Frances, and Elizabeth, who married three brothers, Colonel John, Colonel Francis, and Reuben Thornton; she married, secondly, Colonel Henry Willis, the founder of Fredericksburg, by whom she had a son, Colonel Lewis Willis, and a daughter, Anne, who married Duff Greenv John Lewis, the son of Colonel Fielding and Catherine (Washington) Lewis, was married five times.
  
  First, to Lucy Thornton, youngest daughter of Colonel John Thornton and Mildred Gregory, by whom he had a daughter, Mildred (the sister of Lucy Thornton married Samuel Washington, brother of the President, General William Woodford of the Revolution, and John Taliaferro of Dissington). Secondly, John Lewis married Elizabeth Thornton, daughter of Colonel Francis Thornton and Frances Gregory, by whom he had no child.
  
  One of the brothers of his second wife was the gallant Colonel John Thornton of the Revolution, who married Jane, daughter of Augustine Washington, elder half-brother of the President, and was the
  ancestor of the wife of Senator James B. Beck, and Mildred, one of the sisters of his second wife was the wife of Charles Washington, younger full-brother of the President.
  
  John Lewis' third wife was a daughter of Gabriel Jones, widely known in Virginia during his own generation, and remembered for years after all who knew him had passed away as "The Valley Lawyer."  The fourth wife of John Lewis was Mary Anne Fontaine, the widow Armistead, her father of that excellent Huguenot stock, her mother a Winston, of the same blood as Patrick Henry, the South Carolina Prestons, and Mrs. Madison.
  
  John Lewis' fifth wife was Mildred Carter, widow of Robert Mercer, a son of the Princeton hero.  She was a daughter of Landon Carter, her mother being a daughter of Colonel Lewis Willis.  It is a noteworthy circumstance that the two first wives of John Lewis were granddaughters of his great aunt, Mildred Washington, by her first husband, Roger Gregory, and his fifth and last wife, her great-granddaughter by her second husband, Colonel Henry Willis."
  -  From Courier-Journal Genealogies
  
  The italics are corrections by Mr. Thomas Waring Lewis ...
  
  --  Peyton Neale Clarke, Old King William homes and families; an account of some of the old homesteads and families of King William County, Virginia, from its earliest settlement (Louisville: John P Morton And Company, 1897), p 75, https://archive.org/stream/oldkingwilliamho00clar/oldkingwilliamho00c
  --------------------------------
  
  --------------------------------
  Mary Ball Washington
  BIRTH 30 Nov 1708 Lancaster County, Virginia, USA
  DEATH 26 Aug 1789 (aged 80) Spotsylvania County, Virginia, USA
  BURIAL Kenmore Plantation and Gardens, Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg City, Virginia
  
  Mother of George Washington.
  "The Belle of Epping Forest" was born in 1708 or 1709 in Lancaster County, Virginia to a well-to-do family. Both of her parents had children from prior marriages, but she would be the only child born to Joseph and Mary Ball; her father would die when Mary was only a few years old. At the age of thirteen, her mother died as well. Her early years were spent between the homes of her half-sister Elizabeth and her guardian Colonel George Eskridge, being educated in the "feminine arts" of sewing, cooking, running an estate and etiquette.
  
  At the age of twenty, Mary traveled to London to visit her half-brother Joseph and there met Augustine Washington, who also lived in Virginia. They courted for two years before being married in 1731 and settling down at his estate, Pope's Creek, in Westmoreland County. Augustine was much like her father, having three children from a prior marriage and sufficiently successful, owning an ironworks. The following year on February 22, their first son George was born. Six years and four more children later, the family moved to Ferry Farm to be closer to Augustine's ironworks. Mary was left alone with the children often, as her husband did a lot of traveling for his business; it was during these times that she handled the overseeing of the farm and personally educating all of her children in everything from studying the Bible to horsemanship.
  
  In April of 1743, Augustine died unexpectedly and left Mary a widow at thirty-five with five children under twelve years old. She threw herself into managing the six hundred acre estate; while women were not allowed to own property at the time, Augustine had left Ferry Farm to George and she was allowed possession until he came of age. Unable to send George to England to be educated as was the custom of the time, she sent him to Mount Vernon to study with his elder half-brother Lawrence.
  
  At the age of fourteen, George wanted to enlist in the British Navy, but Mary put her foot down - he was needed at home. To combat his disappointment, she let him have his father's old surveying equipment and hired a tutor to train him; within years he was buying up land with the money he earned as a surveyor. Mary continued to live at Ferry Farm for forty-five years, never remarrying. Her land and her children were her life, there was no room for anything else. As she got older, however, she could not work as often as she liked and came to rely on some support from her children.
  
  In 1772, when she was sixty-four, George bought her a house in Fredericksburg a few blocks from Kenmore, the estate of her daughter Betty and her husband Fielding Lewis. The relationship between her and George was more strained than the one she had with the rest of her children, yet he was her main provider in her later years, even buying her a "riding chair" so that she could more easily visit her friends and neighbors. During the War for Independence, she would walk or ride to an outcropping of rock on Betty's estate, now referred to as "Meditation Rock" where she would pray for her son and his success.
  
  Mary lived to see her son George not only succeed in his drive to defeat the British in the War, but become the first President of the United States. He last visited her on his way to New York City for his inauguration in April 1789. Four months later, Mary Ball Washington died on August 26, 1789 at the age of eighty-one and was buried a few paces from Meditation Rock.
  
  Bio by: Lysa
  
  Parents:
  Joseph Ball 1649-1711
  Mary Montague Ball 1670-1721
  
  Spouse Augustine Washington 1694-1743
  
  Half Siblings:
  Frances Ball Carter 1681-1699
  Anne Ball Conway 1686-1764
  
  Children:
  Butler Washington 1716-1716
  Lawrence Washington 1718-1752
  Augustine Washington 1720-1762
  George Washington 1732-1799
  Elizabeth Washington Lewis 1733-1797
  Samuel Washington 1734-1781
  John Augustine Washington 1736-1787
  Charles Washington 1738-1799
  
  Maintained by Find A Grave, Added 5 May 1998
  --  Find A Grave Memorial 2870, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/2870/mary-washington
  --------------------------------
  

Sources

• 1. Find a Grave Memorial Registry
• 2. Archive.org
• 3. Family Bibles
• 4. FamilySearch Trees
• 5. Millennium Files, Ancestry.com