Elizabeth “Betty” Washington was born on June 20, 1733, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, the first daughter of Augustine Washington and his second wife, Mary Ball Washington. She was about sixteen months younger than her brother George. The family also included younger brothers Samuel, John Augustine, and Charles, and a younger sister, Mildred, who died in infancy. Two older half-brothers, Lawrence and Augustine Jr., were children of Augustine Washington’s first marriage.

Betty’s earliest years were spent within the Washington family’s network of tobacco plantations. In 1738 the household moved to the property later called Ferry Farm, across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg. Her father died in 1743, when Betty was nine, leaving Mary Washington to manage the farm and raise the five surviving children still at home. Enslaved men, women, and children performed much of the agricultural and domestic labor that sustained the family.

No detailed record of Betty’s schooling survives. A Virginia planter’s daughter ordinarily learned reading, writing, religion, sewing, food preparation, household accounts, and the supervision of domestic work. Betty’s later competence as mistress of a large household suggests practical training, but it is important not to assign her a specific tutor or curriculum without evidence. She grew up especially close to George, a relationship that continued throughout their lives.

On May 7, 1750, at age sixteen, Betty married Fielding Lewis, a prosperous Fredericksburg merchant and widower. The couple were second cousins through the Warner family. Lewis’s trade connected the household to Atlantic imports, tobacco exports, credit, and the commercial growth of Fredericksburg. Their first child, Fielding Jr., was born in 1751; ten more children followed, though several died young.

The Lewises initially lived in Fredericksburg and later developed the plantation home now known as Kenmore.