Both John’s son, Lawrence, and Lawrence’s son, Augustine, describe themselves in their wills as “gentlemen,” and both intermarried with the “gentry families” of Virginia.  Augustine was educated at Appleby School, in England, like his grandfather followed the sea for a time, was interested in iron mines, and in other ways proved himself far more than the average Virginia planter of his day.  He was twice married,—­which marriages, with unconscious humor, he describes in his will as “several Ventures,”—­had ten children, and died in 1743, when George, his fifth child and the first by his second “Venture,” was a boy of eleven.  The father thus took little part in the life of the lad, and almost the only mention of him by his son still extant is the one recorded in Washington’s round school-boy hand in the family Bible, to the effect that “Augustine Washington and Mary Ball was Married the Sixth of March 17-30/31.  Augustine Washington Departed this Life ye 12th Day of April 1743, Aged 49 Years.”

The mother, Mary Washington, was more of a factor, though chiefly by mere length of life, for she lived to be eighty-three, and died but ten years before her son.  That Washington owed his personal appearance to the Balls is true, but otherwise the sentimentality that has been lavished about the relations between the two and her influence upon him, partakes of fiction rather than of truth.  After his father’s death the boy passed most of his time at the homes of his two elder brothers, and this was fortunate, for they were educated men, of some colonial consequence, while his mother lived in comparatively straitened circumstances, was illiterate and untidy, and, moreover, if tradition is to be believed, smoked a pipe.  Her course with the lad was blamed by a contemporary as “fond and unthinking,” and this is borne out by such facts as can be gleaned, for when his brothers wished to send him to sea she made “trifling objections,” and prevented his taking what they thought an advantageous opening; when the brilliant offer of a position on Braddock’s staff was tendered to Washington, his mother, “alarmed at the report,” hurried to Mount Vernon and endeavored to prevent him from accepting it; still again, after Braddock’s defeat, she so wearied her son with pleas not to risk the dangers of another campaign that Washington finally wrote her, “It would reflect dishonor upon me to refuse; and that, I am sure, must or ought to give you greater uneasiness, than my going in an honorable command.”  After he inherited Mount Vernon the two seem to have seen little of each other, though, when occasion took him near Fredericksburg, he usually stopped to see her for a few hours, or even for a night.