[1] He was the son of Sarah (née Walker), and her husband Sir William Fairfax, a British colonel who had served as an English Customs agent in Barbados, as well as a justice and Governor of the Bahamas.
Genealogists disagree about whether George William Fairfax's mother, Sarah Walker, might have possibly been of mixed race.
Col. Gale has indeed kindly offered to take the care of safe conducting my eldest son George, upwards of seven years old but I judged it too forward to send him before I had your's or some one of his Uncles' or Aunts' invitation, altho' I have no reason to doubt any of their indulgences to a poor West India boy especially as he has the marks in his visage that will always testify his parentage.
[2]"West India" was a term used synonymously with Creole, which denoted native-born as much as it did mixed race in the period.
[4] In 1752, George William Fairfax was elected to represent then-vast Frederick County (almost all of which was in the Northern Neck Proprietary) in the House of Burgesses, where he succeeded George Fairfax and served alongside Gabriel Jones until Jones resigned to accept the office of county coroner.
[5] In 1757 after his father's death, George William Fairfax inherited the Belvoir plantation, which also operated using enslaved labor.
They returned to England in 1773, prior to the events of the American Revolutionary War, to take care of a family property matter.
In one of his final acts in Virginia, in 1772, Fairfax together with Washington funded the gilding of the altar in the new Pohick Church, on whose vestry both served.