FRANCIS RIVES LASSITER.
The subject of this sketch was born in Petersburg, on February 18,
1866. He was educated at the University school in Petersburg, and
went to the University of Virginia, where, after graduating in several
classical schools, he studied law under Prof John B. Minor, graduating
in 1886, with degree of Bachelor of Law. He then went to live in Boston,
Massachusetts, where he was admitted to the Suffolk bar, and
practiced until his return to Petersburg in the spring of 1888, when he
was elected city attorney and has been in practice since.
His father is D. W. Lassiter, M. D., who was born in Northampton
county, North Carolina, the son of William Lassiter, who was also the
son of William Lassiter, descended from a Huguenot family who settled
at the mouth of the Roanoke river in the early part of the 18th century.
The Lassiter family have intermarried with the families of Daniel and
Parker, of North Carolina.
The mother of Francis Rives Lassiter was Anna Rives Lassiter, nee
Heath, daughter of Hartwell P. Heath and Eliza Cureton Rives, his wife.
The Heaths are descended from Robert Heath, who was attorney-general
under Charles I and patentee of the Carolinas, prior to the grant to the
Lords Proprietors. The family lived in Surry and Prince George counties,
and members of it served in the Revolutionary and Mexican wars.
The Rives people belong to the main branch of the Virginia Rives
family, of which the Albemarle Rives family is an offshoot. The most
distinguished of recent years have been Francis Everod Rives, great
uncle of the subject of this sketch, who was a member of Congress and
twice a member of the Virginia legislature, and mayor of Petersburg;
and Timothy Rives, of Prince George county, who was called "the war
horse of the Democracy," and who, though opposed to the late war,
suffered severely from the Union forces.
