From George Washington to William Augustine Washington, 14 November 1796
To William Augustine Washington
Philadelphia, 14 Nov. 1796. GW advises his nephew of a letter he received several years earlier from Isaac Heard, Garter Principal King at Arms, “enclosing our Armorial; and requesting a genealogical account of our progenitors since the first arrival of them in this country.”1 GW adds that he replied to Heard with the “best information” he had,2 and “wrote … to Lawrence Washington for an account of them.”3 GW encloses a copy of a more recent letter from Heard, and asks William Augustine to assist him in answering “the queries propounded in his letter.”4
ALS, ViMtvL; ALS (letterpress copy), ViMtvL. For the text of this letter and the reply, see William Augustine Washington to GW, 23 March 1798, and n.2 to that document, in 2:151–55.
1. Heard first wrote GW about his ancestry in a letter of 7 Dec. 1791, which enclosed a genealogical chart of the Washington family and other documents. Heard again wrote GW on 9 Aug. 1793.
2. After having received ancestral and other family information from Hannah Fairfax Washington, GW provided Heard with genealogical data in a letter to him of 2 May 1792 (see GW to Hannah Fairfax Washington, 24 March 1792, and Hannah Fairfax Washington to GW, 9 April 1792).
3. No letter on the subject of genealogy from GW to his cousin Lawrence Washington of Chotank has been found.
4. GW probably enclosed a copy of the letter of 10 July 1796 that he had received from Heard.