Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/236



Mary Washington, the mother of Washington, was descended from an ancient family of note which emigrated from England in 1650, and settled in Lancaster, Virginia, on the Rappahannock River. Mary, the youngest child of her father, Joseph Ball, was born in 1706, at Epping Forest, the family homestead, which he inherited from his father, William Ball, the first emigrant. Joseph Ball was made Colonel by Governor Spotswood in 1710, and known as Colonel Ball, of Lancaster. Five years before that time he executed a will in which is found the following: "I give and bequeath unto my daughter, Mary, four hundred acres of land in Richmond County, in ye freshes of Rappa-h-n River, being part of a patten of 1,600 acres to her, ye said Mary, and her heirs forever." She was then five years old. We also have the Ball coat-of-arms as follows: "The escutcheon has a lion rampant, a coat-of-mail and a shield bearing two lions and a fleur-de-lys. The crest is a helmet with closed visor. Above the lion is a broad bar, half red and half gold. On the scroll which belongs to it are these words: 'Coelumque tueri.'" When Mary was twenty-one her mother died, and she was taken by her brother Joseph, a lawyer of London, to his home near that city in 1728-29. In 1729 she met Augustine Washington, a son of an eminent and wealthy family of illustrious English descent, and described as "a stately and handsome gentleman." In the prime of early maturity, a widower with two little sons, he had come to England to look after an estate left him by his grand-