Eleanor Parke Custis, known throughout her life as Nelly, was born on March 31, 1779, at Mount Airy in Maryland. She was the third daughter of John Parke Custis and Eleanor Calvert Custis. Through her father she was a grandson of Martha Washington, and George Washington was her step-grandfather. Her mother descended from the Calvert family associated with Maryland’s proprietors. Nelly therefore entered one of the most prominent kinship networks in the Revolutionary generation. Her father died of camp fever shortly after the Yorktown campaign in 1781, when Nelly was two. Martha and George Washington took Nelly and her infant brother George Washington Parke Custis into their household, while the two elder girls remained primarily with their widowed mother. Nelly consequently grew up at Mount Vernon and, during Washington’s presidency, in the executive households at New York and Philadelphia. Martha Washington supervised her upbringing closely. Nelly studied reading, writing, arithmetic, French, geography, music, dancing, sewing, and household management. She became an accomplished singer and harpsichord player and received lessons from respected instructors. Her surviving correspondence shows humor, intelligence, and occasional resistance to the strict expectations imposed upon young women. Life in the presidential household exposed her to diplomats, politicians, artists, and visitors from across the Atlantic world. Yet she also witnessed the labor of enslaved people who sustained Mount Vernon and the executive household. As a Custis heir, she would eventually possess enslaved people and property of her own. Nelly’s courtship choices attracted family attention. George Washington expressed protective concern and advised her against marrying merely from fashion or pressure. She eventually chose his nephew Lawrence Lewis, whom she married at Mount Vernon in 1799. Before becoming a wife and plantation mistress, Nelly had been shaped by paternal loss, adoption into the Washington household, unusually broad education, music, travel between public capitals, and intimate observation of the first presidency. Her early life joined private family affection with the ceremonial world of the new republic.