Credit Side Annotation

Line 32 - At this time the Custis estate again was being threatened by the claims first brought against it as early as 1723 by one Thomas Dunbar, renamed Dunbar Parke, of Antigua. When Daniel Parke Custis’s grandfather Daniel Parke (b. 1669) was murdered in 1710 at Antigua where he was in residence as the British governor of the Leeward Islands, it was discovered that Parke had left his Antigua property valued at more than £30,000 to Lucy Chester, the young daughter of a Mrs. Catherine Chester of that place. The Antigua property was to pass to Lucy’s heirs provided that upon her marriage she and her husband changed their name to Parke. Under the terms of the will, Colonel Parke’s daughter Frances Parke Custis, the mother of Daniel Parke Custis, was to get her father’s Virginia and English property, out of which Parke’s legal debts, presumably in Virginia and England, were to be paid. Nearly fifteen years after Parke’s death, and long after Frances Custis herself had died, John Custis, Frances’s husband and Daniel Parke Custis’s father, received notice from Dunbar Parke, who had taken the name upon his marriage to Lucy Chester, that the Frances Parke Custis estate must reimburse him for up to £10,000 which had been paid out of his wife’s inheritance to settle Col. Daniel Parke’s Antiguan debts. The point at issue was whether Parke’s will required only that the Custises pay his Virginia and English debts or that they pay all of his debts, including those in Antigua. Lawyers on both sides remained active off and on from the mid–1720s. At the time of John Custis’s death in 1749 (Dunbar Parke died in 1734) the case still had not come to trial. Dunbar’s heirs renewed the suit in 1750. When the trial was finally held before the Virginia General Court in April 1754, it was dismissed. In July 1757 the Privy Council [213] reversed the Virginia court’s decision, which meant that the case should go back to Virginia for retrial. It was upon word of this that Martha Custis suggested to John Mercer the appointment of a male guardian for her children (see note 4), and it was with the reopening of the case in mind that GW posed his eighth and ninth questions to John Mercer.

The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, ed. Theodore J. Crackel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008.

[Rotunda | Founders | Print (Colonial Series, Volume 6, pages 210 - 213)]