page_title: Lee family
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Lee family / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Thomas Lee colonial governor of Virginia
context_page_description: The Lee family of the United States is a historically significant Virginia and Maryland political family, whose many prominent members are known for their accomplishments in politics and the military. The family became prominent in colonial British North America when Richard Lee I immigrated to Virginia in 1639 and made his fortune in tobacco.
  Members of the family include Thomas Lee, a founder of the Ohio Company and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses; Francis Lightfoot Lee and Richard Henry Lee, signers of the American Declaration of Independence, with Richard Lee also serving as one of Virginia's inaugural U.S. Senators; Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, Lieutenant Colonel in the Continental Army and Governor of Virginia; Thomas Sim Lee, Governor of Maryland and lastly, and most famous, General-in-Chief Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate States Army and its pivotal Army of Northern Virginia for the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War. Twelfth President Zachary Taylor, and ninth Chief Justice Edward Douglass White were also descendants of Richard Lee I. Confederate President Jefferson Davis married Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of Zachary Taylor.
context_section_description: Richard Lee asserted descent from the Lees of Shropshire and bore a coat of arms which was confirmed in 1660/1 by John Gibbon, Bluemantle Pursuivant of the College of Arms. In 1988, a study by William Thorndal was published in the  National Genealogical Society Quarterly, proving that Richard Lee I was actually the son of John Lee, a clothier, and his wife Jane Hancock; that Richard had been born not at Coton Hall in Shropshire, but in Worcester (some distance down the River Severn); and that several of their immediate relatives had been apprenticed as vintners. The question, then, has been 'how did Richard Lee descend from the family with whom he shared a coat of arms?' The book Collections for the Ancestry of Colonel Richard Lee, Virginia Emigrant, by English genealogist Alan Nicholls presented evidence for the English ancestry of Colonel Richard Lee using contemporary documents, transcribing records left by Richard Lee, his family, and their associates. It also looks at the records left by the Shropshire and Worcester Lee families. These data and additional related findings demonstrate that Richard Lee's Marson ancestors, the wealthiest tradesmen and merchants in Worcester, were likely the cause of his grandfather and father's lives in Worcester.  A great-uncle, Richard Lee, was probably the man of the same name, called 'Richard Lee, Gent' buried at Coton Hall's Alveley Parish in 1613.
caption: Thomas Lee (1690–1750), Virginia colonist and cofounder of the Ohio Company.
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