Mildred Washington
(ca 1697 - 1747)
Mildred Washington was one of the three orphans of Maj. Lawrence Washington and
Mildred Warner, his wife, who are chiefly remembered as George Washington's
grandparents. Little Mildred was
certainly less than eighteen months old, probably much younger than that when
she is first mentioned - in her father's will, written 11 Mar. 1697/8.
Within three weeks he died, His widow was soon married again, to George
Gale, who traded between his native Whitehaven, England and Maryland, and the
Gales went to Whitehaven. There,
Mildred Warner died in 1700/1.
Mildred Washington, age three, was an orphan.
She and her two brothers, John, eight years old, and Augustine, six, were
brought back to Virginia and raised by their father's cousin, John Washington
(1671 - ca 1721).
The next thing we know of Mildred is that she married around 1716 John Lewis of
Gloucester County. Her mother,
Mildred Warner Washington Gale, had been from a prominent Gloucester County
family, the Warners. Her older
brother, John, married a Gloucester County bride, Catharine Whiting, and settled
permanently there on land apparently inherited from the Warners.
Mildred's husband, John Lewis, was the son of Edward Lewis and his wife
Susannah. John was the nephew of
the John Lewis who had married Mildred's aunt, Elizabeth Warner, and so was a
connection, but not, so far as we know, a relative of Mildred.
John Lewis, Mildred's husband, was the eldest son of the eldest surviving
son of the only son to have issue of the first immigrant of this Lewis family to
Virginia. As primogeniture head of
the family, he would have been a very wealthy man for his time.
Unfortunately, however, he died on April 7,
1718, leaving Mildred a
childless widow of twenty.
As was not uncommon at the time, only a few months later she remarried.
Her second husband was Roger Gregory of Stratton Major Parish, King and
Queen County. King and Queen is one
of the counties whose early court records have been destroyed, and apparently
nothing whatsoever is known of Roger Gregory's background or family connections,
beyond the fact that he married Mildred and was the father of her three
daughters.
While it must be assumed that the Gregorys lived in King and Queen, next to
Gloucester, Mildred had inherited from her father a twenty-five-hundred acre
property in the present Fairfax County.
Her grandfather, the immigrant John Washington, had patented it soon
before his death in 1677. In 1726
Mildred and Roger Gregory sold this tract to her brother, Augustine Washington.
It is, of course, the place that Augustine's son, Lawrence Washington,
later named Mt. Vernon.
After Roger Gregory's death in 1730 or 1731, Mildred and her three young
daughters may have stayed in King & Queen Co. In 1732, however, she must have
been (although perhaps only on a visit), in Fredericksburg or down the Northern
Neck when she acted as godmother for her brother Augustine's son, George.
Thus, she is invariably remembered today as “George Washington's aunt and
godmother.”
In November, 1733, her thrice-married cousin, Mildred Lewis Brown Howell Willis
died, and the widower, Henry Willis, immediately asked our Mildred Gregory to
become his third wife. The story is
that she was discovered weeping bitterly after her cousin Mildred's death, but
explained that she was not weeping so much at the loss of her cousin, as at the
prospect that Col. Henry Willis
would inevitably come courting, and she did not know what to answer him.
Indeed it might well have given her pause, for he had a family of eight or ten
children then still living, from his two previous marriages.
They ranged in age from Mary, age seventeen, and just marrying Hancock
Lee, down to Isabella, a six months babe in arms.
Nevertheless, within two months of cousin Mildred's death, our Mildred
did marry Henry Willis. He was aged
42, and so five or six years her senior.
Thus he fulfilled the oft repeated statement about him, that he had
courted all three of his wives as maids and married them all as widows.
Soon, at the end of 1734, Mildred had her fourth and last child, Lewis
Willis, who some think was named in memory of her first childless, husband.
In the late 1720's Henry Willis had moved up from Gloucester County and helped
found the town of Fredericksburg, where he immediately became, as William Byrd
wrote in his diary, the “top man of the place”.
Here then Mildred settled with him, and that in turn settled the future
of her three Gregory daughters. In
1736, Frances, who could not have been more than just barely 17, married Francis
Thornton, whose family had long been settled in the region, at the falls of the
Rappanhannock. Then, in 1740,
daughter Mildred, now about 18, married John Thornton, brother of Francis.
In 1742 it would seem Elizabeth tried to break the Thorton habit, and
marry her stepbrother, Henry Willis, Jr. When, however, he died in 1757, she
reverted to type and married Reuben Thornton, brother of Francis and John.
So we always remember that the three Gregory sisters married the three
Thornton brothers.
Elizabeth had no children by
these two marriages, nor indeed by two later marriages after Reuben Thornton
died, but Francis and Mildred, together with their younger half-brother Lewis
Willis, eventually produced 19 grandchildren for our Mildred Washington Lewis
Gregory Willis. Ultimately there
were some 74 great grandchildren, and her descendants now number many thousands.
Henry Willis died in 1740,
and Mildred did not marry again, but survived until 1747, when she died at the
age of 50. She thus lived to be
much older than either of her parents or her Washington grandparents.
An article, 'A Virginia Lady of Quality and Her Possessions,' in the
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, January 1948, gives the details of
her estate inventory. It is an
interesting and intimate glimpse of the possessions and way of life of the
people of that time.
Our President General (1997–1999), Wilma Brown Thomas, is a direct descendant of
Mildred Washington and Col. Henry Willis.
John A. Washington
January 1998