Jane Butler was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, on December 24, 1699, the daughter of Caleb Butler and Mary Foxall Butler. Her parents belonged to the well-connected planter society of Virginia’s Northern Neck and owned substantial land in the Mattox Neck region. Jane grew up in an Anglican, agricultural household whose status rested upon land, tobacco production, family alliances, and the labor of indentured and enslaved workers.

Little direct evidence survives about Jane’s childhood or education. A girl of her position would ordinarily have been taught religion, reading, sewing, food and textile management, household accounts, medical remedies, and the forms of hospitality expected on a plantation. Those are contextual probabilities rather than individually documented facts. Her marriage prospects were shaped by the network of neighboring planter families.

On April 20, 1715, when she was about fifteen, Jane married Augustine Washington, a young landowner from another established Westmoreland family. The union connected the Butler property and influence with the Washington family’s growing estate. Jane entered adult household responsibility at an age that appears strikingly young today but was legally and socially possible in colonial Virginia.

The couple’s first child, Butler Washington, was born around 1716 and died in infancy. Lawrence followed in 1718, Augustine Jr. around 1719 or 1720, and a daughter named Jane in 1722. Jane Butler Washington supervised the domestic life surrounding Augustine’s farms and business interests while enduring the dangers of pregnancy and childhood disease. The precise household arrangements are imperfectly recorded, and later attention to her husband’s second family has often obscured her experience.

Jane died on November 24, 1729, one month before her thirtieth birthday. Lawrence and Augustine Jr. survived to adulthood; daughter Jane died while still young. Augustine married Mary Ball in 1731, and their eldest son was George Washington. Jane Butler’s entire adult life therefore preceded George’s birth, yet her marriage and children formed the older branch of the Washington household, especially Lawrence Washington, whose example and Mount Vernon estate later exerted a powerful influence on his half-brother.