Though they are on different sides of the statue debate, what Ms. Finney and Blair Lee IV have in common, along with hundreds of other close and distant relatives, is their ancestral connection to Richard Lee, an early settler of Virginia in the 17th century who is thought to have come from Shropshire in England’s West Midlands.

Over the decades, that ancestry came to confer considerable prestige, abetted by the creation in 1921 of the Society of the Lees of Virginia, an organization to “promote a better knowledge of the patriotic services of the Lee Family.”

Carter B. Refo, the society’s membership secretary, declined to discuss the statue issue or the Lee family’s long association with slavery before the Civil War. “The Society has a policy of not making public statements, so I am unable to help in that regard,” he said.

Lee descendants maintain a tradition of curating the family’s place in history. Edmund Jennings Lee compiled a genealogical tome in 1895 that remains an important reference work on the family. Today, one of the descendants who helps organize and edit the family’s papers is Robert E.L. DeButts Jr., who works in the financial crime compliance group at Goldman Sachs.

Much of the admiration for Robert E. Lee centers on his long and distinguished military career, on his opposition to secession, on claims that he disliked slavery and on his postwar years, when he supported reconciliation between North and South as president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Va.

“There was this promotion of the general as a Christian gentlemen who only fought to side with his homeland, the Commonwealth of Virginia,” said Glenn LaFantasie, a professor of Civil War history at Western Kentucky University. “Of course, Lee was much more than that, an owner of slaves and a man who sought the capture of his runaway slaves. He fought to perpetuate slavery.”