Our Founding Father’s Fathers

The father of John Washington was a fifth son who became a clergyman and was later expelled from his parish as a royalist during the English Civil War. Taking note of his prospects in his home country, the parson’s son emigrated to colonial Virginia and there he was able to procure a landed estate of 6,000 acres, an achievement nigh impossible to someone of his station in the motherland.

Captain Lawrence Washington, a son of Colonel John, continued the family tradition of supporting the Crown by serving in high government positions in Virginia. He married Mildred Warner, granddaughter of a former acting governor of Virginia and a descendant of the medieval Lords Kyme. According to English peerage law her direct descendants were potential heirs to the Kyme title, which had fallen into disuse since 1381. George Washington was undoubtedly not aware of his access to a title of nobility.

When Captain Lawrence Washington died his son Augustine, future father of the first American president, was only three years old. Augustine’s mother, Mildred, as was customary in those times, promptly remarried, and with her new husband, returned the Washington children to England. Mildred soon died in childbirth and the guardianship of the three Washington orphans fell to their stepfather. This arrangement was contested in court and a cousin of the deceased Captain Lawrence Washington, John Washington, took over and returned to Virginia with the children.

When young George Washington was but eleven, his own father died. Augustine’s widow and children lived with various relatives, spending much time at the Mount Vernon estate that had been passed to George’s elder half-brother, Lawrence Washington, oldest son of Augustine. Lawrence was a worthy father figure for George, having been educated in England and possessed of graceful bearing. He had married a cousin of the Lords Fairfax family and his father-in-law Colonel William Fairfax was quite influential on the young George Washington. It was from links with the Fairfax family that George Washington was tasked as a surveyor of their lands in Virginia.

At the death of Lawrence the landed estate he had inherited from his father totaled more than 10,000 acres. After the deaths of Lawrence’s heirs, Mount Vernon eventually passed to the younger half-brother George Washington. In colonial Virginia the English system of entail was in effect which allowed estates to be kept whole by passing to a single heir. This system was abolished after the Revolution at the insistence of Thomas Jefferson.

Young Washington was ambitious and could have won appointment as a British naval officer through his contacts with nobleman Lord Fairfax, but his mother would have none of it. She was highly possessive of her son and her distress at his leaving her for abroad made English schooling and a hoped for naval career impossible for young George.

And the rest is history, as they say. The Washington Legacy Lives.