 As an adult, Washington served as a member of the vestry (lay council) for his local parish.In colonial-era Virginia, office-holding qualifications at all levels—including the House of Burgesses, to which Washington was elected in 1758—required affiliation with the current state religion and an undertaking that one would neither express dissent nor do anything that did not conform to church doctrine.At the library of the New-York Historical Society, some manuscripts containing a leaf from the church record of Pohick were available to Benson Lossing, an American historian, which he included in his "Field Book of the Revolution"; the leaf contained the following signed oath, required to qualify individuals as vestrymen