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Councillor John Custis IV was a brother of my great8-grandfather, Col. Henry Custis, of Virginia's Eastern Shore. History remembers John most as the father of Martha Washington's first husband from whose estate her second husband, George Washington, benefitted so much, and as the great-great-grandfather of Gen. Robert E. Lee's wife, but Custis was also a distinguished colonial botanist, colonial official, leading landowner, and leading slaveholder in Virginia who lived most of his adult life in Williamsburg, VA but is buried on the old Custis plantation on Old Plantation Creek in Northampton Co., VA on the Eastern Shore, beside his grandfather Maj. Gen. John Custis II (ca. 1629-1696), my great10-grandfather whose lineage I used to join the Society of Colonial Wars in 2000. John IV's Colonial Williamsburg home and extensive gardens were located on the present Francis Street near where the Colonial Parkway passes beneath the road, less than half a mile from my alma mater, the College of William and Mary. I hope that someday the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation will decide to construct a likely replica of his house and gardens on the site to add to all the other buildings and gardens there that were restored or reconstructed for interpretive tours. Through the Osborne family of London, England, John IV and I were related distantly to statesman Peyton Randolph, whose Colonial Williamsburg home has been nicely restored and is open for tours. Custis was also a brother-in-law of the more famous Colonial Virginian, William Byrd II of "Westover," Charles City Co., VA. Not only do many prominent southern white families descend from the Custises, but John and several of his descendants are known to have sired children with their slaves and are therefore probably ancestors of numerous African-Americans.
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