Mary Anna Custis Lee

Mary Anna Randolph Custis was the only surviving child of George Washington Parke Custis and Mary Lee Fitzhugh Custis. Through her father she was the step-great-granddaughter of George Washington and inheritor of Arlington House and its collection of Mount Vernon relics. She married Robert E. Lee Person Robert E. Lee b. 1807 · d. 1870 United States Army officer who spent much of his childhood in Alexandria at the house on Oronoco Street before his West Point appointment, and who later commanded Confederate … on June 30, 1831 at Arlington and bore seven children, three of whom — G. W. Custis Lee Person G. W. Custis Lee b. 1832 · d. 1913 Eldest son of and ; Confederate major general; later president of Washington and Lee University succeeding his father. , W. H. F. "Rooney" Lee Person W. H. F. "Rooney" Lee b. 1837 · d. 1891 Second son of and ; Confederate major general of cavalry; later U.S. Representative from Virginia. , and Robert E. Lee Jr. Person Robert E. Lee Jr. b. 1843 · d. 1914 Third son of and ; Confederate captain. Author of the 1904 memoir *Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee*, an essential primary source for Lee biographers. — served as Confederate officers.

Mary’s chronic arthritis and the wartime confiscation of Arlington (the Lee estate became Arlington National Cemetery in 1864) shaped her later years. She lived to see her husband installed as president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, and died there in 1873.