 Good afternoon and welcome to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. I'm Colleen Chogan, Archivist of the United States, and I am pleased you could join us for today's program. Drawing on more than a decade of research into the question of who was George Washington's family, Cassandra Good shows us how the descendants of Martha Washington reinforced their bond with George Washington and enhanced their own power and status in First Family, George Washington's heirs and the making of America. George Washington, the father of his country, had no children of his own, but he was a devoted guardian to Martha's children and grandchildren. The Custis family, in turn, considered themselves guardians of Washington's reputation and legacy after his death. First Family further explores how their experiences were intertwined with the national issues of slavery, race, and class. Though he deferred to Martha in most matters regarding the children, he took a fatherly interest in their education and well-being. He wrote solicitous letters to them, even offering granddaughters Betsy and Nellie advice on love, and some of these letters are preserved in Founders Online, a searchable website hosted by the National Archives through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Through Founders Online, readers can directly encounter Washington's own words, as well as those of six other founding fathers. Cassandra Good is a writer and historian focused on gender and politics in early America and is the author of the Prize-Winning Founding Friendships, Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic. She is taught at Marymount University, George Washington University, and the University of Mary Washington and has written for Smithsonian Magazine, Mental Floss, The Atlantic, and Slate. Please join me in welcoming Cassandra Good. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today at the National Archives. Thanks so much to the Archives for having us. To Dr. Shogan for the introduction. My name is Lindsay Trevinsky. I am a historian of the presidency in early America and the author of the Cabinet, George Washington, and the creation of an American institution, as well as the editor of Morning the President's Loss and Legacy in American Culture, which I had the privilege of sharing at the Archives actually a couple of weeks ago. It's my pleasure to join Dr. Cassandra Good today to talk about her new book, First Family, and we are planned for today's to have a conversation, to share some of my questions and talk about some of the overlap actually between our work, which one wouldn't necessarily always anticipate. And then hopefully you all have some questions, so please be sure to enter them wherever you are watching, and we will hopefully be able to get some of those questions as soon as we can. So I think maybe a good place to start would be, Dr. Good, if you could tell us why is it important that we know about Washington's family? How do they fit into the American story? What do they tell us about the American experience? Maybe start with sort of the big picture takeaway. Yeah, I think many people think of George Washington first of all as a pretty stiff, maybe even stoic figure in marble, and they don't think of him as a father. And so I think part of what's interesting about looking at his family is seeing this other side of him. The archivist mentioned his letters offering courtship advice, and then you can see letters sort of chastising his adopted son, Wash, who is not a great student. So you see this personal side of him, but you can also see the importance of family in the American political system. We've had this idea of a public focus on the president's family from the beginning, although they were not always called the first family. That term doesn't really become popular until in fact the second half of the 20th century, but this family sets the mold for that public role of the president's family, and they are celebrities. Even the fact, and I'll share the family portrait that's on the cover of the book, even the fact that they're in this family portrait, you're seeing Wash on the left and Nellie is the young woman standing behind the table. The fact that they are in this portrait that is reproduced over and over and over again as a print. Thousands and thousands of Americans have this in their home, long into the 19th century. So this family really sort of sets the tone for the president's family and is the first sort of celebrity political family in the country. So you mentioned Wash and Nellie, but maybe we could back up a little bit and say if we know that we don't have that Washington doesn't have children. So how did he come to have these children around him, if he doesn't actually have them themselves and who are some of the big players in this book. So yeah, that's a good question because he doesn't have biological children as far as historians can tell. He had an illness earlier in his life that caused him to be sterile. He comes to the marriage with two children, and they're fairly young when Martha Marys George, her husband had passed away and she actually lost two of her four children. So those children Jackie and Patsy become Washington's stepchildren. Patsy dies at just 17 and then Jackie marries pretty young and then he and his wife have four surviving children. So Jackie dies when the youngest of them is just six months old so that's wash is only six months old when his father dies. And so George and Martha offered to take in the younger two children, Nellie and wash. This is not that uncommon in that time period that if somebody had a fair number of children, and you know there's a loss of a spouse or there's a financial difficulty that somebody else in the family will raise the children. So their last name is Custis because that is the last name of Martha's first husband. So that is how we have the Custis family here. The older two girls stay with their mother and later stepfather, but they spend a lot of time with George and Martha, and those older two girls are patty and then this is confusing Elizabeth who goes by Betsy before she gets married, and Eliza after she gets married. So the family tree is a little bit complicated there is a family tree at the beginning in the book to help people sort this out. I should also note that in here to it's quite likely that Jackie Custis had a child by an enslaved woman whose name was William Costin, and who Eliza and her husband Thomas law later free. And so this man William Costin is the probable sort of fifth Custis sibling. Gosh there's so many directions I want to take this conversation but maybe let me just start with one that actually just popped into my to my mind. I would think that if we were doing an arrangement like that today that the younger ones would stay with the mother and the older ones would go somewhere else. Do you know how they decided basically which children we're going to go where. It's not entirely clear and it's not even entirely clear when the sort of permanent move there is made there's no legal form of adoption so there's never any paperwork around this. At that point, and in fact George Washington is not even the kids official guardian he gets into a debate with the kids uncle saying why don't you do it and he says why don't you do it and they're going back and forth. So part of it is that their mother was ill after the birth of both Nellie and wash, and we know even Nellie was sent to Mount Vernon to be nursed there by a wet nurse somewhere on the estate. We don't know if it sounds like it was a white woman we're not sure exactly who this person was. And so it may have just been sort of health issues in terms of taking care of very young children weren't weaned yet that the younger ones end up going. Well, and I think it's also important for us to note that one of the reasons this debate was happening, which I learned as I was reading this book was that Washington was away as the commander in chief of the continental army at that point so all of this is happening of course within the context of the American Revolution and American history more broadly. I mentioned William Costin did. Is there evidence that the, the laws or the Custis is or the Washington's knew about Costin to what extent was that relationship acknowledged other than of course he was emancipated later on. William Costin story is really tricky and we still don't have all the answers on it. There's not that there's a few legal documents that give us some sense, but it appears my theory is that his mother who went by both Anne and Nancy was on one of the southern Custis estates that they owned near Richmond. It doesn't appear that she was ever at Mount Vernon or that he was, and they do stay in touch throughout Costin's life he is a carriage driver for a little while, and runs errands for them and then he becomes a porter at the Bank of Washington, and is successful enough that he at some points is loaning money to them to his possible half siblings. The real acknowledgement that we get of this family relationship is there's a recording in a journal from the 1860s of somebody who talked to William Costin's daughter who said Jackie Custis was my grandfather. And she talked about going to the funeral of wash cost us and being allowed into the sort of private viewing of the coffin with just the family. Well, we don't have any sort of public acknowledgement during Costin's lifetime. The other thing to note is that he names all of his kids with a park middle name, which all of the four siblings, I'm talking about here have that it goes back to this complicated lawsuit that required people to have the name park to inherit that was not really still an effect at this point, but was still a family tradition and so it's hard to imagine why Costin would name his kids with park in all of their names, if you didn't think he was related and one of them is even part Custis and the son went by Custis. So we have to imagine the people in the area new. That's so interesting. So, as you were, you know, you kind of alluded to there was a relative dearth of records on this particular subject and I know with my own work that you know sometimes people produce a lot of writing materials that tend to be saved more readily than like an oral history or even a material culture item like a piece of clothing. And some people of course, especially if they're literate produce none. So, how did you go about researching the entire project but especially the people who were less inclined to leave a written record behind. I'm lucky that most of George Washington's papers are already published and as the archivist mentioned they're available freely to anybody online, but that actually was just a small portion of what I was looking at. There's also a new edition of Martha Washington's papers, which was getting finished as I was finishing the book and that was very helpful. And already what I was looking at in terms of the Custis's letters were handwritten letters in the archive at Mount Vernon at the Library Congress, and then at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. They were spread to some other places to and I was also looking at objects that they passed down through the family. And one other key clue with William Costin is actually that there is in a private collection. There's an excellent piece that had been owned by George Washington that passed down through Costin's family, and we know that that's the provenance of it. And it appears that piece had been in Eliza Custis's house and she probably gave it to him. But this is a very valuable piece that you would try and keep in the family so sometimes objects do help tell the story. There are a few letters to William Costin in the archives at Mount Vernon. And then in terms of slavery more broadly, it was challenging because George Washington kept meticulous records at Mount Vernon. You've I'm sure seen some of these and so people can really see a lot about the enslaved community there. Whereas, if any of the other Custis has kept that kind of record for their states, they're gone. They weren't keeping anything near as detailed, but we don't even have lists of people that were enslaved on the Custis's estates. So it was, as I'm reading letters, a mention of an enslaved person coming up. And also sometimes just imagining when for instance, Nellie as a teenager says, Oh, I'm so busy taking care of, you know, my sister just had a baby and I'm taking care of the baby and running the household. And then just remembering, Oh, they have dozens of enslaved people. Clearly she's not doing all of this herself. So just sort of pausing to remind myself about who's actually doing most of the labor I might not be able to bring a specific person in, but I can remind the reader about who's actually doing the work here. So one of the things that I think this book does the really great job of doing is, is it sort of has a foot in multiple different eras of American history, it takes the Washington story and it really drags it up through the antebellum era into the Civil War period. And so I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how once Washington died in December of 1799, how that changed the family dynamic, who, you know, carried the Washington mantle, how did that, how did that process work. And that ends up being, it's not in some ways even at Washington's death so much as at Martha's in 1802 because when George Washington dies, Mount Vernon and everything in it passes to Martha. And so the family wash in Nellie and then Nellie's new husband and baby still live at Mount Vernon until Martha dies. All their stuff is still there. The older girls Eliza and Patty are setting up households, but they're still sort of centered at Mount Vernon and they have that as their sort of central axis. And it is still clear who Washington's family as it's Martha and these kids. When Martha dies in 1802, that's when everything really changes because George Washington left Mount Vernon to his nephew, Bushrod Washington, who was a Supreme Court justice, and part of why he does that versus the Custis kids is they have a ton of land and enslaved people. They don't need Mount Vernon. And I mean Bushrod also has another estate, but he inherits basically an empty shell, because the other thing that happens is that Martha stipulates in her will that everything in the house down to the tools in the sheds are going to be auctioned off. And the Custis kids buy all the good stuff from the house. And they end up being keepers of all the sort of Washington relics, which does help them in the case they are Washington's family. They were already famous. Then they have all the stuff people are coming to their houses, and I'll share here on the screen, just a map in the DC area where their houses end up so you can see Tudor place in Georgetown is Patty Custis Peters house, Arlington house now at Arlington cemetery is wash Custis's house. Hoxton house is now on the campus of the Episcopal school and that's very briefly where Eliza Custis law lived, and then Woodland is split off from Mount Vernon estate for Nellie Custis Lewis, and her husband Lawrence who was George Washington's nephew. So they're all living close to the nation's capital that also helps them in terms of keeping up that Washington connection. And then the other thing is that the Washington blood relatives with the Washington name including Bushrod have from what I can tell zero interest in being known as Washington's family. So it is the Custis's who both have the stuff and the desire to work at making sure people know who they are remember who they are, and the day or the keepers of George Washington's legacy. If you look at Bushrod's obituary. When he dies in 1829 doesn't even mention he was related to George Washington. Whereas all the Custis's their obituaries mentioned this. This is the key part of their identity. We have a sense of why the other Washington relatives didn't really want anything to do with it. You know, I think I look at them and they don't have as much correspondence surviving so it's not quite as clear. But part of it is, they are sort of planters plantation owners and slavers on a fairly small ish scale. They're so wealthy in Northern Virginia. And in what is now West Virginia on some lands that they inherited from George Washington. And so that seems to be their main vocation in life. The other thing is, they were never as close with George Washington, even Bushrod who's the nephew that, you know, is seen as the most promising says I was always sort of in awe of him and shy around him. The Custis's had a much closer relationship with him. So they have the personal stories, not just the stuff. They actually have the personal stories about him to share. And so I think there's just that in some ways the Washington's they just have the last name and some of the land. They don't have the actual history of that connection with him that they can leverage. So as you were sharing where the different children ended up living, of course there were lots of different last names that come into play for the women. And one of the things that I think is so interesting is as Washington is navigating his presidency, which is the story. I know, I know better. They are navigating these huge personal decisions. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about sort of to put us into context like why the marriage choice was so important in the 18th century when we look at at women's letters it dominates the correspondence and for I'm hoping to explain that, you know, for good reason and why, and then how being near Washington shifted or changed or helped shape those choices. I think, you know, you look at marriage for young women in this period, it is the single biggest choice choice of a spouse at this point because we don't have parents choosing spouses. For the most part in this era they're usually going to approve, but or maybe disapprove, but this is actually a choice that the woman gets to make the man gets to choose whether to propose but she can say yes or no. And that's a real moment of power for women here. And so all of the cast as women, marry men that at least when they're getting married they are in love with and this is the person they want to marry. But with Washington as president, everybody's watching them and Nellie in particular so there's gossip all the time about who she might be dating or she danced a bunch of dances with this guy does that mean that they're going to get married. It really annoys her, but part of that is just being a public celebrity. It's actually better that she wasn't blood related to Washington. There's multiple people who say when he becomes president, people like john Adams are saying, Oh, thank goodness he does not have kids, because we'd have European royalty wanting to create diplomatic businesses by marrying their kids off to Washington's kids. So, you know the cuss this is because they're not blood related. It seems none of that posturing is happening at least, but people are just watching them closely. And when Eliza, for instance, Marys Thomas law, this British man who's 20 years older has spent a while as an agent in India, and has brought mixed race children with him from India. John Adams has some things to say about that that is something for public comment as well. The one sort of dynastic thing we see in here in terms of their marriage choices is that appears at least john Adams says this later that George Washington and john Adams were hoping that john son john Quincy would marry Nellie Custis. We never really knew each other and in fact, Nellie hated the atoms at a level that doesn't make sense to me. But that apparently, you know, was sort of one hope of that would have been a sort of federalist dynasty I think if that had happened. That's so interesting. So who did they end up marrying what were sort of the connections their places how did that affect their lives. So the first to get married was Patty, and Patty Marys this man Thomas Peter who's from a pretty well to do merchant family in Georgetown. And they end up building a house called to replace which you can visit now they also have plantations the biggest one is in Maryland near what is now poolsville. And so that is actually where most of their enslaved people end up, and that appears to have been a very happy marriage. I mean Patty doesn't like being apart from him. They have a bunch of children together and seem to have a pretty happy life together. They're not as lucky. So this guy Thomas law that she marries, they have one child together, and then within eight years of their marriage they separate, and this is the scandal of Washington city. Everybody's talking about it why have they separated what is going on, which of them is crazy, or crazier, they both get accused of being crazy. And she sort of sets up an independent life for herself, which causes people you know she, again, gets called crazy gets called an Amazon for doing this. And then eventually they do get divorced, which she would have been happy to just keep things as they were with the separation, but they get divorced she starts going by Mrs. Custis again instead of Mrs law. And then she goes to Washington is talking about that too. And then she has these sort of love affairs with a couple of French diplomats gets engaged to a French imposter. I mean Eliza story is just, it should be in a soap opera. Ends up marrying as I mentioned George's nephew Lawrence who has just come to help out his uncle in the house. It seems like Lawrence liked Nellie for a long time and Nellie wasn't interested until it sounded like Lawrence was going to go away to war possibly in 1798 when there was a chance of war. And she's like, Oh wait a second. Yes, I will marry you. And this interestingly is the nephew that looked the most like George Washington. Marys, they have a bunch of children together it does not appear to be a great marriage. He's an invalid front like from their honeymoon he has some eye problem and has to be in a dark room for three weeks. So that is never a great relationship. Wash the youngest Marys Molly Fitzhugh, who is a distant cousin, and that also appears to be a very happy marriage. They only have one surviving child together. But that seems to be, you know they seem very happy together and Molly, in some ways I find one of the more likable, even though we're not supposed to judge our historical figures here. Molly is somebody that everybody else is saying, I really like this person. You just don't see anybody saying anything negative about Molly Custis and so you can see she's somebody a lot of people liked. So that is a rundown of their marriages. Excellent. So in addition to their marriages taking them different directions, one of the things I think about the book is so interesting is how they like so many families both then and now were divided by politics and partisanship. So could you maybe talk a little bit about how those things came into play over the decades as they continue to live in the area. Yeah I mean as you well know they're early, you know even in the 1790s the political partisan strife is really ugly, and especially in Washington's second term super ugly and Washington while trying to be a pub party is, you know, sort of associated with the Federalists and so it makes sense that three of the four kids end up being federalist but Eliza is a Democratic Republican, and this causes her to not get along with her siblings in many ways. I mean her sister Patty is an extreme enough Federalist. So the Federalists were pro British. Many of them in the war of 1812, including wash and Nellie sort of are no longer pro British when they're fighting a war with Britain again, but Patty is like oh no still pro British. So when the British troops under Wellington burn all the public buildings in DC. So Patty, who was a few months pregnant comes down, meets the troops talks about how nice they are and then when she has her daughter. She names her Britannia Wellington. So you can see the level, I mean, and even her Britannia says, much later that her mother was always a Federalist, the Federalist basically die out in 1815. But Patty never stops being a Federalist. The other siblings sort of move into more like less partisan and more focused on personality, kind of politics, and so the other two figures that they're really into our Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor who were both military generals who become president. And so I think, you know, for them, their politics, if they've been Federalist Jackson does not make sense as the person to support. But one of Jackson's sort of kids that he helped raise Mary's Nellie's daughter so they sort of know each other from that. They love military heroes because George Washington was a military hero, and Zachary Taylor in particular was this guy is the second coming of George Washington. He is the closest thing we have. Not very many people were enthusiastic about Zachary Taylor. I mean, Nellie is one of the few Zachary Taylor enthusiasts. Wash also went out on the campaign trail for him, giving campaign speeches. And so yeah, their politics are kind of strange and evolving here. And then I will say when it comes to the Civil War they all die before the Civil War happens. So I think Wash, I think would have supported the United States he was already when there were whenever there was talk of succession or these conflicts, very strong and saying, I don't identify as a southerner. I am an American the Union is very important. But of course, the amazing connection here is his one white daughter marries Robert E. Lee. And so we know sort of where that goes and most of the next generations of the family do fight for the Confederacy, which I think is part of why they fall out of public favor and celebrity at the end of this period. I was at a teacher institute the other day and a teacher asked me is they had visited Arlington house and they were like, the connection between Washington Lee, is it that Robert E. Lee, and I was like that's the one. So I just think that that is a part of the story that so many people don't know but that connection is just so fascinating, especially because Washington was so integral to like defining the concept as of a nation and as one nation, not just, you know, 13 states. I think that connection is just, you know, you sometimes can't make this stuff up with history. And Robert E. Lee was definitely identified with George Washington in the public eye there are a couple of books specifically about this, but you know wash cost us his father in law was probably the most famous George associated person, but you know by the 1840s and 50s, and was always giving speeches he was the representative of the Washington family. And so it was seen as a big betrayal in many ways for Robert E. Lee to make this decision and it's a decision that most of the other Southern officers who trained at West Point did not make. So, and his family, even since we get, you know, they were not one of his daughters supported it, but it seems at the beginning the rest of the family is not thrilled about it. And then, you know, later ends up, especially his wife Mary getting on board with the Confederacy. You mentioned you alluded to this a little bit but you know you talked about how these were really celebrities like they were the most, some of the most famous people at the time. Americans had the portrait of the family, you know, like they were very well known. So is the civil war really to blame for our forgetting of them or what is sort of the process behind which they become, you know, Washington's as not having children is really solidified in in our memory. Yeah, I do think the civil war has a big part to play here. Also, the choices that the Custis's children make. And especially Robert E. Lee, but what you see is, even though Arlington house, which was washed Custis's home Robert E. Lee never owned that home. It was rented by his wife. He never owned it, which is why I find it problematic. And there is a petition out there to change this that it is named now officially the Robert E. Lee Memorial, when it was not his house. I think already even though Arlington house have been known as wash Custis's by the time the US soldiers show up at Arlington house in 1861, they're saying it's Robert E. Lee's house. And Robert E. Lee has made himself so famous through this action that it is almost erased wash Custis. Nobody's talking about wash Custis at this point. And I think also that the fact that the children, the next generation fights in the for the Confederacy also sort of breaks their connection to the patriotism of Washington the great, you know, father figure of America. And we also see the rise of Lincoln as the big focus versus Washington so part of it is just less focus on George Washington. And then the last thing I'd say here is just the fact that they end up not having most the objects anymore. The Peters hang on to their objects for a long time at to replace. But in the 1880s, for instance, Nellie Custis Lewis's grandchildren sell their collection of Washington objects, almost all of them to the Smithsonian. And they're in the American History Museum now. Some of the objects from Arlington house end up getting removed to government custody. They too are mostly in the Smithsonian now. So the big Washington's big camp tent, which if anybody's been to the museum and American Revolution seen that that was removed from Arlington house during the war. So we see sort of the family also losing touch with the things that let them identify as George Washington's airs. It's really interesting. So maybe let's take a step backwards we you know we we alluded to their time and their relation during Washington's presidency but a lot of them were actually there they were actually present and in some of my own research I've done some work on the president's house in Philadelphia which was the biggest private residence at the time or one of the biggest private residences at the time, but nonetheless was absolutely like jam packed with people because there were dozens of enslaved workers and also hired neighbors there were family members there were Washington secretaries. So what was the experience like for these children that we're living in the president's house, and then maybe we can also talk a little bit about how like that has continued with the White House being a very complex and multifaceted place. I think the president's house is such an interesting story even though we don't have this building anymore you know there's a historical display there now in Philadelphia, but fortunately we have pretty good research on exactly the layout of it. And so we know for instance that the kids bedrooms are on the second floor and the office where the cabinet was meeting is on the third floor. And so I can imagine that people coming to cabinet meetings. The famous figures like Alexander Hamilton are walking up the stairs past where the kids bedrooms are the kids must have seen them. The kids if there's yelling going on in a cabinet meeting, which I imagine happened once in a while. And these, they also, because there's not any separation between, you know, it's not like there's an East Wing and a West Wing, it's all one. And if there are dinners with political figures, Nellie was often called upon to play music for them. Several of them she got embarrassed when she was young like wanted to see examples of her artwork because she was being trained in art. And so she's sort of on public display, all the time like her dining room is a public space. And I think even with some of that separation with private quarters in the White House today. There is some of that there's not a total it's still the same structure that all this is happening in. And the President's children cannot be completely cordoned off. You're going to see them in those spaces sometimes. And, you know, I think at this point presidents take quite a bit of effort to protect their family from that and have some means to do that. You know, we think, oh, it's just journalists today that would be hounding them with pictures or may not have been photographs at the time but journalists were very interested in what was going on with the President's family at this point. So, there's not a whole lot that George and Martha can do to completely protect them from this. There's a point at which Martha sends Nellie to stay with her mother and sisters in Virginia for a while. And it's, it's partially she's saying like you haven't spent much time with your mom in a while. But I think it's also that it's at a really stressful point in the second term of Washington's presidency, and just trying to get her away from that atmosphere. I think it's part of what's happening there too. So I think some of these same tensions around, you know, these kids aren't choosing to be in the public eye. The president's family doesn't choose that now. There's some of those same tensions. But it also means they're growing up knowing all these political figures, having these connections that most other people couldn't possibly have. And just for some context for our viewers and our listeners, the Washington's held state dinners on Thursday evenings, which were in the state dining room and usually between 12 and 20 people. They invited Supreme Court justices, congressmen visiting dignitaries, elite families in the area, guests from out of town, and they were very diligent in making sure every single congressional delegation was equally represented. So Georgia had the same number of invites as Rhode Island. But anyone who has had children and has had an adult event or an adult dinner knows that there's going to be some eavesdropping, there's going to be attempts to participate. And we also know that the cabinet secretaries regularly attended these events. So Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Knox, these were people that would have been in and out of the house, sometimes five times per week. And the children absolutely would have, I assume, known them and interacted with them, especially if they were there for a more casual engagement. Yeah, and it's clear that when Eliza and Patty come for a sort of extended visit at one point when Patty gets married and they're going to all these events as well. And even when Martha goes out and pays calls on the wives of these people, she's bringing the girls with her many times. So this sort of also sets up these kids to have really strong political connections, which they're going to use throughout their lives. I should know that none of them can actually run for office for most of their lives. So, of course, the women can't run for office. But watch Custis, he does run for a local office while he's still living in Mount Vernon loses badly. But, but after that, Arlington House Arlington was part of the District of Columbia. And back then, people in District of Columbia cannot even cannot vote for president, and of course don't have any representatives. Wash Custis cannot even vote for president for most of his life until Arlington is actually returned to Virginia in 1846 and it's huge national news that wash Custis in 1848 is going to vote for the first time. And that's for Zachary Taylor, who I mentioned he campaigns for he is at every single inauguration. So, I think that, you know, when we look at the kids. political involvement it goes back to they've sort of been trained in this growing up, made those connections and kept those connections up. That's, yeah, that's really fascinating. They're just the fact that he was voting for the first time and that was news is really is really remarkable. So, you mentioned that one of the more likable characters in the book was Molly but is there one that you felt like was the most fun to write about which in my experience is not always the most likable but sometimes the most colorful so who was your who like made the words just really flow when you were writing about them. I think it was challenging with all four Custis siblings because you know all four of them are major enslavers. And I'm also seeing beyond, you know what they're doing to enslaved people selling them, you know, treating them badly in ways that are pretty challenging, but I'm also just, you know, seeing into their private lives to any time they're being nasty or unpleasant or embarrassing. So, you know, in ways it's hard to, there were times I struggled with all of them, but I mentioned Eliza before as somebody who could have a soap opera. She just really feels like the one to me who, because of the fact that she was always defined gender norms that she was, you know, she would write them letters, go to the secretary of war that they should do this. Or if I was president, this is what I would be doing. And she was so politically engaged, you get the sense that if this had been another time, she out of all four of the siblings would have been the one running for them. And, you know, she's really attempting to be a lobbyist, and then she has all these romantic dramas as well. So there's all these different sides to her and she ultimately has a kind of tragic story, because her daughter gets married and has several children and then dies soon after having her last child. And Eliza helps raise some of those grandchildren for a little while. But then we get to this point where there's some kind of break between her and the son-in-law. And the son-in-law basically comes in, grabs his kids, and says, you're not even allowed to communicate with them anymore. And she is absolutely devastated. And she is the one who dies the youngest. She basically goes to Richmond to visit a friend and is very ill at that point. She's only in her 50s. But, you know, the friends write to the family and say, like, this isn't looking good. I think you should come down here. I think before any of the family can even get there, she passes away in 1831 at New Year's Eve, which I think is suitably dramatic for her. And in fact, her ex-husband didn't even believe it at first that she had died. But the story goes that when his servant came in and told him, he said something like, oh, no way, pass the potatoes. Like, he just didn't think it was possible. So her whole story, her husband, her lovers, her politics, all of that, I just found really compelling. Yeah, that's a really, it's a terribly tragic ending. As you said, it's very suitable for a soap opera and would be excellent for documentation on film. So you mentioned that the concept of a first family, like that terminology didn't emerge really until the 1960s. But obviously, there was a sense that Washington had this family because it was pictured and documented. So how does the concept, the idea that the president's family matters? How does that change over time? Is it consistent? Do you see sort of patterns or is it very different today than what we see back then? Well, part of what's tricky here is that if we look at the string of early presidents, a lot of them don't have children and or else they have adult children who weren't there. But if we think about, you know, James Madison, he also has, you know, a stepson who's sort of never do well and not really present that much in Washington. In person, his daughters, adult daughters are there occasionally. But he doesn't really have kids living in the president's house. Jackson never had any children of his own. And so we have a bunch of these presidents that don't have children. And so I think that's part of what's going on in the 19th century. And people that do have children, you know, we go to Abraham Lincoln, there's a lot of attention on the children. So I think part of it is a difference in the way we have media coverage. So there's always going to be gossip reported. But if there can be photographs, if there can be video, that is going to change things. The key that seems to happen in the 1960s, just if you search for the term first family and newspapers, that it starts coming up a lot then is the Kennedys. And so we have young children. And so I think part of it is having young children that really zeros that attention in on the president's family. But it's not just the president in this early time period, pretty much everybody was introduced. They didn't see that much separation between the public and private life of a political figure. And this is why, in part, we end up having duals breaking out all the time between political figures because there's not really a separation of if you insult me personally, you're insulting me politically or if you insult my political ideas, it's a personal insult. So there's not even that much of a division in this period. And so I think that's also a difference with our situation today. There's a sense in terms of the Kennedys being the ones that provoked this idea, especially because if we look at previous presidents and their families the ones that do garner the most attention are the ones with young children. You mentioned Abraham Lincoln, they were constantly making news. And of course they had our Roosevelt's very young and very reabunctious family was the journalist's favorite subject to talk about, especially when they got into trouble, which they did quite a lot, including bringing ponies and goats up in the elevator, and and trying to hide them from their father, which I think is probably one of my favorite White House stories so that makes a lot of sense that that's always been a fascination for the American people. Let's maybe talk a little bit about the writing process. This is something that I'm always fascinated about how other writers write their books and I think audiences generally really enjoy it too because it is such a lengthy process and requires a dedication to delayed gratification. So how did you go from your first book is on founding friendships it's the relationships between men and women platonic relationships usually how did you go from that to this book what sparked the idea was there a question was there a source was there something like that. Yeah, I actually see these books as connected in the sense that they're both about personal relationships and power and politics. Not entirely in either book, but that's always been my sort of underlying fascination. I actually came across Nellie and Eliza and their correspondence with male friends, when I was working on founding friendships, and looking at just trying to figure out who are these people. And then I was like, wait, I didn't know that George Washington raised children, there must be a biography on them, and I looked, and there wasn't. And so that's sort of the Genesis, the idea here of thinking, okay, these people must have been well known at the time George Washington is treated like a quasi monarch in certain ways. And so what is the public think his family's role is going to be especially after he's out of the presidency. And that's what I was really curious about. And honestly, initially I thought this would not just be about the Custises. I had also come across Bushrod Washington and that first project. And it was only in reading the Washington's the Washington nephews and nieces papers that I realized, oh they're not really the ones in the public eye. People are wondering what their role is going to be it's the Custises. And so that even that process took several years of research to sort of figure out the focus here. And so the archivist mentioned in the introduction that it took me over a decade of work on this book, and that's partially because of how many different people's letters I was looking at. And then it's partially also trying to track down and really tell the story of the enslaved people. When I think we haven't touched on the fact that when Martha Washington died. The majority of people in Mount Vernon of enslaved people were owned by the Custis estate. So they were not freed George Washington could not have freed them. So there were this big group of people who were separated among the four siblings. So it's something like 160 people that get split up among the four of them, and trying to track that down. That's still an ongoing fascination and something that local historic sites are working on. And I was really lucky to get to work with some of the descendants on that so part of the book to was getting to know descendants. Well that leads perfectly into an audience question that we have here which is, there are a lot of people who do claim to be descendants or say that they're from the Washington and Custis families. What is the process for proving that is a genealogy is a documentation is a genetic testing how does that work. There is a Washington family descendants group, and what they rely on is showing where on the family tree you are. So it's not DNA testing it's showing where you line up in the genealogy now that is going to mean that only white descendants are going to show up. You know that's a particular issue. They also go back it's not obviously since George Washington didn't have any biological descendants it's going back. I think they go back maybe to his grandfather. So it's many different lines of Washington's that are involved in this. The Custis is don't have a sort of central. They're gathering in the same way I know that at to replace for instance or at Woodlawn there are white descendants of the Lewis's or the Peters that get together. And then in terms of enslaved people. There has been a little bit of DNA testing, not very much. So for instance, from historical records that wash Custis freed about 10 or 12 children and their mothers, and it does appear from contemporary accounts that most of those were probably if not all his children by enslaved women through sexual exploitation and so some of those families now through family stories and then looking at records are involved with these historic sites now. I think one of the trickier ones is the story of West Ford who there was a New York article about this, and his descendants argue from family history that he was fathered by George Washington, and the problem. There's some problems in terms of lining up the historical record with that that lines up much more neatly with bushrod Washington bushrods father bushrods brothers, but also we don't have DNA at this point that could distinguish between that group of people. So even if we did a DNA test on that. So I'm hopeful that in the future there's better ways of getting at this DNA but yeah it's a combination of family stories, looking at genealogy, a little bit at this point of DNA. And then sort of decisions by historic sites and genealogists and descendants groups on what their standards are going to be. It's definitely an ongoing process and I think also one of the elements that has made it more interesting and a little bit easier to do but also then very much more complicated is the rise of these online databases like family search and my heritage calm that allow people to track certain things but of course depend in a lot of cases on the written records that primarily white families left behind. And it's very tricky and it is getting better, we're getting better at tracking, especially enslaved people, you know, there are black people today who can track back much farther than I think in the past because of the digitization of so many families, especially families who for instance passed through the port of New Orleans, which there were 50 people from Woodlawn that were sent, Nellie, Custis Lewis's house that were sent or sold to Louisiana. And so there's all sorts of parish records and ship records and the sale record, we get those kind of records. And so it partially is a sort of whim of geography and how good the records were and whether they were saved from those places. Well, maybe as a final wrap up question, could you tell the audience what you're working on next, what's your next project and how did you get there from here. So I mentioned before that with both this book and the previous one I'm interested in relationships and power and politics, and that is really centered a lot around women for me in particular and understanding how women can access power. So this book is going to be about women's political power, how they're accessing power, a sort of bigger synthesis of that centered around some individual people, thinking right now from the revolution to reconstruction. It's still sort of in early stages, and I also really want to use images and objects to help tell that story, because for instance, I found there's at the Smithsonian for instance. There's some campaign paraphernalia objects designed for women, like tortoiseshell hair combs with Andrew Jackson's image on them. So women can't vote, but they can display political affiliation. They can display partisan views. And there are other ways that they're participating. They're just sometimes harder to find. And so that's really what I want to focus on in that next book. Excellent. Well, thank you so much to everyone for joining this conversation for your time and attention. We really appreciate it. I highly encourage everyone to go pick out the book. It is first family. It is available from any local bookstore near you if they don't have it, they can order it for you. And of course from the archives, it is a wonderful read and I think everyone will come away with a better understanding of both Washington and the nation, which is of course always our goal with doing any sort of history and thank you again to the archives for having us. It's always wonderful to be able to see you all and to share history with you. And thank you so much to the archives and to Lindsay.