became the Prince William County sheriff, as well as its tax collector, and posted the required bond. Virginia not providing for public education in this era, when George was 10, his aunt Sarah Brent married the prominent patriot and widower George Mason, and young George Graham went with her to Gunston Hall, Mason's plantation house, to be educated alongside Mason's two youngest sons, John Mason and Thomas Mason (1770-1800). He and Thomas Mason were then sent to a newly established school in Fredericksburg, of which his benefactor's cousin John Mercer was on the Board of Trustees, before George Graham was sent to New York to complete his higher studies at Columbia College. He earned his degree in 1790 or 1792, then traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland for further studies. Personal life Graham married twice. In 1803 he married the widow Mary Ann Barnes Hooe (1768-1814), the daughter of prominent local lawyer and landowner Gerald Hooe and widow (with six children) of George Mason V (his classmates' eldest brother, who had died in 1796). Mary Ann bore four additional children from this marriage before her death in 1814, of complications from the final childbirths. Although their first and last sons died as infants, their son George Mason Graham would become a lawyer, planter and officeholder in Louisiana, and their daughter Mary would become a Catholic nun (Sister Mary Bernard Graham a/k/a "Cousin Mollie" to the family) and schoolmistress at the Visitation Convent in Washington, D.C. Mary Anne Graham's final will (written six weeks before her death) gave three slaves to Richard Barnes Mason, two to George Mason Graham and several and their children to Mary Ann Jane Graham, although a codicil changed the two named negroes given to George Mason Graham to her daughter Sally B. Mason instead. Eleven years later, in 1825, the widowed George Graham remarried, to Alexandria-born Jane Love Watson (1799-1869) (whose brother James M. Watson would rise to become a Commodore in the U.S. Navy), and they had at least three children. Their only son to survive to adulthood, Major George Richard Graham (1828-1889), served in the United States Marine Corps during the Mexican War and the American Civil War and afterward commanded the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, and their daughter Jennie Brent Graham (1826-1899) married Georgia-born career naval officer Henry Kollock Davenport, who likewise remained loyal during the American Civil War. In 1906, their grandson Adm. Richard