ORIGINS AND YOUTH Zealous biographers of George Washington have traced for him a most respectable, not to say distinguished, ancestry.

They go back to the time of Queen Elizabeth, and find Washingtons then who were "gentlemen." A family of the name existed in Northumberland and Durham, but modern investigation points to Sulgrave, in Northamptonshire, as the English home of his stock.

Here was born, probably during the reign of Charles I, his great-grandfather, John Washington, who was a sea-going man, and settled in Virginia in 1657.
His eldest son, Lawrence, had three children--John, Augustine, and Mildred.

Of these, Augustine married twice, and by his second wife, Mary Ball, whom he married on March 17, 1730, there were six children--George, Betty, Samuel, John Augustine, Charles, and Mildred.
The family home at Bridges Creek, near the Potomac, in Westmoreland County, was Washington's birthplace, and (February 11, Old Style) February 22, New Style, 1732, was the date.

We hear little about his childhood, he being a wholesomely unprecocious boy.