William Fleming was born on July 7, 1736, in Cumberland County, Virginia, the son of John Fleming and Mary Bolling Fleming. Through his mother he descended from the Bolling family and the colonial lineage associated with Pocahontas and John Rolfe. He grew up within Virginia’s planter gentry, where family connections, land, Anglican worship, and county office shaped a young gentleman’s opportunities. Fleming received private education and pursued the law. He studied under established attorneys rather than attending a modern law school, reading English legal authorities and learning through observation of courts and preparation of documents. He was admitted to practice and developed a reputation for learning and careful judgment. His legal work concerned land, debt, inheritance, and the administration of a slaveholding plantation society. Fleming acquired property and enslaved people and became integrated into the class whose disputes he adjudicated. He married Elizabeth Champe, joining another prominent Virginia family, and established a household with children. Public responsibility followed professional success. Fleming served in local offices, the House of Burgesses, and Revolutionary conventions. His legal training made him valuable when Virginia had to replace royal institutions with republican courts and statutes. He was selected for judicial office and eventually served on the state’s highest court. Before achieving notice as Judge William Fleming, he had been shaped by gentry kinship, classical and legal education, professional apprenticeship, marriage, plantation ownership, and county service. He should not be confused with the Scottish-born physician William Fleming, also represented in the database. The judge’s formative life was distinctly Virginian and legal rather than medical and frontier-based. His authority grew from sustained mastery of law and from membership in the interconnected families that dominated colonial public life.