Talk:John Custis

John Custis has been listed as one of the History good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
December 5, 2022	Good article nominee	Listed

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on December 23, 2022.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that slave owner John Custis petitioned the Governor of Virginia to manumit a slave child whom he had fathered?

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by SL93 (talk) 00:51, 18 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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Comment or view
Article history

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... that John Custis's marriage was strained to where he would sometimes communicate to his wife through their enslaved servants? Source: Forman, Henry Chandlee (1975). The Virginia Eastern Shore and its British Origins: History, Gardens & Antiquities. Eastern Shore Publishers' Associates. ASIN B0006CMBNG. Page 57
- ALT1: ... that John Custis, a slaveowner, petitioned the Governor of Virginia to manumit a slave? Source: Wiencek, Henry (2003). An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-1-4668-5659-2. Page 73
- Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Ryti–Ribbentrop Agreement

Improved to Good Article status by Dabberoni15 (talk). Nominated by Onegreatjoke (talk) at 21:53, 10 December 2022 (UTC).[reply]

Article was brought to GA-status, and nominated for DYK on due time. Iti is neutral and sourced througout. "Earwig's Copyvio Detector" reports no essential text similarities. I find the ALT1-hook interesting, but suggest a more clear one as follows: "... that slave owner John Custis petitioned the Governor of Virginia to manumit a slave child, he fathered?". You can recommend it as ALT2 if you like. The hook is well-formatted. Its length is within limit. For the hook fact's accuracy, I AGF since the source is offline.QPQ was done. Good to go. CeeGee 10:18, 11 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

more work needed

I improved the article a while ago and am glad (but puzzled) it reached good article status a year ago, apparently through the efforts of people more familiar with British terminology than American. I had planned to add a simple mention in the "death and legacy" section about one of his plantations now being within York River State Park, but, frankly couldn't, given the article's current state, which only mentions his property holdings in Northampton County, the town/city of Williamsburg (which BTW is near York County) and Antigua. I took out some passive constructions as well as references to "constituencies" as I have never heard that term used in an American context, colonial nor modern. However, I don't have time to check all the intervening changes, most of which are only for a few bytes. Today I noticed his legislative service was under "early life" and the heading "political career" started with a discussion of the odd relationship with his first wife, and ended with a discussion of his gardening, so I changed the first header to "early life and education" and the latter to "career". Nonetheless, the article still now seems chronologically challenged, not only because the Antigua messy inheritance by his first wife was not resolved in his lifetime. This man's acknowledgement of his son by an enslaved woman is mentioned in the article under the "later life and death" heading, while his marriages are mentioned sideways in the next section "personal life, family and legacy". To me that makes little sense, so I write here urging fewer passive constructions and more logic (such as he had two marriages and also acknowledged fathering a child by an enslaved woman, but the boy died before his father). I also changed the misleading infobox which appeared to have him born in Arlington, Virginia, which is several hundred miles away from his actual birthplace, Arlington plantation in Northampton County (on Virginia's Eastern Shore). The current Arlington, Virginia was named in part to honor the old Custis plantation, as well as the powerful British Lord Arlington who lived many decades before the American Revolutionary War.Jweaver28 (talk) 00:23, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]