Frances Dandridge Henley was born on November 17, 1779, into the extensive Dandridge family of Virginia. She was the daughter of John Dandridge Henley and Elizabeth Dandridge Henley and was related through both blood and family association to Martha Washington. Her parents belonged to the interconnected gentry families whose marriages, estates, and public service linked households across Tidewater Virginia. Frances grew up within this privileged world, although surviving records preserve far less about her childhood than about the celebrated relatives around her. Her father was a nephew of Martha Washington and pursued a naval career during the Revolutionary era before serving in the new United States Navy. His periods of service and travel meant that the rhythms of Frances’s childhood were influenced by war, maritime employment, and extended-family support. Her mother, also a Dandridge relation, managed the domestic side of a household embedded in a broad kinship network. Frances had siblings, including Elizabeth and John Dandridge Henley, and would have understood family identity not simply through her immediate parents but through numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins. No detailed account of Frances’s schooling has been located in the standard biographical record. A girl of her social position would ordinarily have been educated at home or in a small private setting, with attention to reading, writing, religion, needlework, music, household administration, and the social accomplishments expected of a future gentlewoman. That general pattern should not be mistaken for a documented curriculum in her particular case. What can be said safely is that she reached adulthood able to move within the Washington family’s educated and socially prominent circle. Frances was born while the Revolution was still underway and grew up during the uncertain transition from colony to republic. Stories of military service and the personal costs of independence surrounded her family. Before she became known through her marriage to Tobias Lear, George Washington’s longtime secretary, her identity had been shaped by the Dandridge and Henley households, the obligations of elite Virginia kinship, and close familial connections to Mount Vernon.