Further information: Washington family and British America

The Washington family was a wealthy Virginia family which had made its fortune in land speculation.
[10] Washington's great-grandfather John Washington immigrated in 1656 from Sulgrave, England, to the
English colony of Virginia where he accumulated 5,000 acres (2,000 ha) of land, including Little Hunting Creek on
the Potomac River. George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, at Popes Creek in Westmoreland County,
Virginia,[11] and was the first of six children of Augustine and Mary Ball Washington.[12] His father was a justice of the
peace and a prominent public figure who had three additional children from his first marriage to Jane Butler.[13] The
family moved to Little Hunting Creek in 1735, then to Ferry Farm near Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1738. When
Augustine died in 1743, Washington inherited Ferry Farm and ten slaves; his older half-brother Lawrence inherited
Little Hunting Creek and renamed it Mount Vernon.[14]
Washington did not have the formal education his elder brothers received at Appleby Grammar School in England,
but he did learn mathematics, trigonometry, and land surveying. He was a talented draftsman and map-maker. By
early adulthood he was writing with "considerable force" and "precision";[15] however, his writing displayed little wit or
humor. In pursuit of admiration, status, and power, he tended to attribute his shortcomings and failures to someone
else's ineffectuality.[16]
Washington often visited Mount Vernon and Belvoir, the plantation that belonged to Lawrence's father-in-law William
Fairfax. Fairfax became Washington's patron and surrogate father, and Washington spent a month in 1748 with a
team surveying Fairfax's Shenandoah Valley property.[17] He received a surveyor's license the following year from
the College of William & Mary;[c] Fairfax appointed him surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia, and he thus
familiarized himself with the frontier region, resigning from the job in 1750. By 1752 he had bought almost 1,500
acres (600 ha) in the Valley and owned 2,315 acres (937 ha).[19]
In 1751, Washington made his only trip abroad when he accompanied Lawrence to Barbados, hoping the climate
would cure his brother's tuberculosis.[20] Washington contracted smallpox during that trip, which immunized him but
left his face slightly scarred.[21] Lawrence died in 1752, and Washington leased Mount Vernon from his widow; he
inherited it outright after her death in 1761.[22]