Frances Parke Custis was born on April 12, 1753, at the Custis family’s White House plantation on the Pamunkey River in New Kent County, Virginia. She was the third child of Daniel Parke Custis and Martha Dandridge Custis. Her parents belonged to the colony’s wealthiest planter families. Daniel had inherited extensive lands and enslaved laborers, while Martha came from the large and well-connected Dandridge family. Frances entered a household of great material privilege, but her life was extremely brief. She had an older brother, Daniel Parke Custis Jr., and an older sister, Martha Parke Custis, often called Patsy. A younger brother, John Parke Custis, known as Jacky, was born in 1754. The nursery at White House would have been supervised by her mother with the assistance of enslaved and hired caregivers. Like other children of elite Virginia households, Frances lived within a plantation world where family comfort and opportunity depended upon the coerced labor of enslaved people. Because Frances died before her fourth birthday, she never received the extended education or social training that would have prepared a planter’s daughter for adulthood. No letters or personal recollections reveal her character. Her short life is known principally through family, parish, estate, and genealogical records. It would be misleading to attribute developed opinions, accomplishments, or later relationships to her. Frances died on April 1, 1757, eleven days before her fourth birthday. Childhood mortality was common in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake, even within wealthy families that could obtain the best care then available. Her death was one of several losses experienced by Martha Custis: Frances’s elder siblings Daniel and Patsy also died young, while only Jacky survived into adulthood. Later in 1757, Daniel Parke Custis died as well, leaving Martha a wealthy widow with two surviving children. Frances never became famous independently; her inclusion in the Custis-Washington family history comes from the life she might have lived and the grief her death brought. Her biography illustrates the vulnerability of colonial childhood and the family circumstances preceding Martha Custis’s marriage to George Washington.