An old Book of Instructions settled the matter. "Where ye same legges which carry a Man into a house cannot bring him out againe, it is Sufficient Sign of Drunkennesse."
The descendants of William Ball held good positions in the social life of the colony. Their names appear in Bishop Meade's list of vestrymen, as founders and patrons of the Indian schools, and fourteen times in the House of Burgesses. They intermarried with the leading families in Virginia; and the Balls, in great numbers, settled the counties of Lancaster, Northumberland, Westmoreland, and Stafford. They are not quoted as eminent in the councils of the time, or as distinguished in letters. That they were good citizens is more to their credit than that they should have filled prominent official positions; for high offices have been held by men who were not loyal to their trusts, and even genius—that beacon of light in the hands of true men—has been a torch of destruction in those of the unworthy.
They, like their English ancestors, bore for their arms a lion rampant holding a ball, and for their motto Cælumque tueri, taken, as we have said, from these lines of Ovid:—
"Os homini sublime dedit, cælumque tueri
Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus."
The rampant lion holding the ball appears on an armorial document belonging to the first emigrant. On the back of this document are the following words, written in the round, large script of those days, which, whatever it left undone, permitted no possible doubt of the meaning it meant to convey:—
"The Coat of Arms of Colonel William Ball, who came from England about the year 1650, leaving two sons—William of Millenbeck [the paternal seat] and Joseph of Epping Forest—and one daughter, Hannah, who married Daniel Fox.... Joseph's male issue is extinct."[2]
George Washington was the grandson of this Joseph Ball through his youngest daughter Mary. She was born at Epping Forest, in Lancaster, Virginia, in 1708, and "not as is persistently stated by careless writers on Nov: 30th 1706—a year before her parents were married."