Frances Jones Dandridge

Frances Jones Dandridge (August 6, 1710 – April 9, 1785) was the mother of Martha Washington, the first First Lady of the United States.

Her father Orlando Jones and maternal grandfather Colonel Gideon Macon served on the House of Burgesses in Colonial Virginia.

She was then raised by her stepmother Mary Elizabeth Williams Jones and later her new husband John James Flourney.

A few years after having herself emancipated at the age of sixteen, Frances married John Dandridge—a prominent planter, Colonel in the local militia, and Clerk of Courts—on July 22, 1730, in New Kent County, Virginia.

Frances Jones, nicknamed Fanny, was born in 1710 on a plantation near Williamsburg near the capital on Queen's Creek.

[4] A year later, Orlando's widow Mary Elizabeth married John James Flourney and her stepchildren lived with them in Williamsburg.

When Lane Jones reached the age of eighteen, he legally emancipated himself and moved in with his aunt in Timson's Neck.

[6] Fanny inherited ten enslaved people and land in King William County from her father, which she brought to the marriage.

[7] The Dandridges lived at the Chestnut Grove plantation on the bank of the Pamunkey River in New Kent County, Virginia.

[10] He and his wife Unity West Dandridge, an heiress, lived on the opposite bank of the river from Chestnut Grove at his Elsing Green estate in King William County, Virginia.

[22][d] Fanny moved to Pamocra, where she died in April 1785, within days of the death of her son Bartholomew, and they were buried in the one-acre graveyard.