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Mary Anna Custis Lee

Wife of Robert E. Lee (1807–1873)

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 21, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee was the wife of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and the last private owner of Arlington House. She was the daughter of George Washington Parke Custis, who was the grandson of Martha Washington, the wife of George Washington. Through her grandmother Eleanor Calvert she was a descendant of King George I.. Lee was a highly educated woman, who edited and published her father's writings after his death.

Editorial summary

“Mary Anna Custis Lee” enters the record as wife of Robert E. Lee (1807–1873). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mary, Anna and Custis can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 73-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Mary, Anna and Custis.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Mary Anna Custis Lee” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Mary, Anna and Custis provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 21, 2026.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Mary Anna Custis Lee”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Mary Anna Custis Lee primary sources, Mary Anna Custis Lee archive and Mary research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Mary Anna Custis Lee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.