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
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