A Long Time Ago/13 Custis

From Wally Atkins Family Wiki

Custis

This page is part of A Long Time Ago: A History of the Atkins-Paynter and Allied Families, the chunked book edition on the Wally Atkins Family Wiki.

  • Book section: Custis
  • Page range in the book: 105-111
  • Chunk order: 13 of 36

This section has been lightly cleaned and reconstructed from the working transcript and related extracted notes. It preserves the strongest readable Custis material, especially where the line intersects with Yeardley, Offley, and the old-house memory around Arlington.

Source note

  • Book: A Long Time Ago: A History of the Atkins-Paynter and Allied Families
  • Transcript source: `012-custis.md`
  • Companion extracted material used: `old-homes-direct-line-notes.md`
  • Editorial note: the surviving transcript includes inventory material, chart spillover, and some badly damaged passages, so this page emphasizes the clearest Custis narrative anchors first

Cleaned import

The Custis branch matters in this book because it connects the family web to some of the most recognizable names and places in Virginia history, but it does so through marriages that also tie back into the Yeardley and Offley-Thorowgood world.

Ann Custis and Argoll Yeardley

One of the most important Custis intersections in the family story is the marriage of Ann Custis to Argoll Yeardley. Through that marriage, the Custis branch enters the same network that runs through Yeardley, Thorowgood, Offley, and later Lawson.

The family history treats this as the point where the direct family interest in the Custis line becomes especially strong, even when the chapter later follows the Custis family for several more generations because of its broader historical significance.

Arlington

The Old Homes in Virginia material says that Arlington stood on the Eastern Shore in Northampton County. A historic marker stood on Route 13 south of Eastville, while the mansion itself, no longer standing at the time of the book, had been located on Route 644, about two miles west of the marker.

The text says Arlington was built by John Custis around the mid-seventeenth century and that it became the home of Major General John Custis and his sister Ann, who married Argoll Yeardley. It also remained associated with later members of the Custis family.

This gives the Custis branch one of the most recognizable old-house settings in the book.

The wider Custis line

The surviving chapter material and connected notes continue the Custis family into later generations because of their historical prominence.

The book says that John and Frances Parke Custis had a son, Daniel Parke Custis, who married Martha Dandridge in 1749. After Daniel's death in 1757, Martha married George Washington on January 2, 1759.

The book further notes that the Custis family home called the White House in New Kent County became part of this later Washington connection. It also follows the line forward to George Washington Parke Custis, who built the later Arlington on the Potomac, and then to Mary Ann Custis, who married Robert E. Lee in 1831.

The family history includes these later generations not because the direct line runs straight through all of them, but because the Custis branch became one of the most historically visible collateral lines connected to the family's earlier Virginia network.

Why Custis matters in this book

The Custis chapter matters because it shows how the family web repeatedly touches major Virginia and national history through marriage, land, and alliance. It is one of the best examples in the book of a collateral line that still matters deeply to the family's sense of place and connection.

It ties together:

  • Ann Custis and Argoll Yeardley
  • Arlington on the Eastern Shore
  • the wider Custis-Parke-Washington-Lee historical chain
  • the same colonial Virginia world already seen in Yeardley, Thorowgood, and Offley

Context notes

Related pages

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