Elizabeth Monroe

Elizabeth Kortright Monroe was First Lady of the United States from 1817 to 1825, as the wife of James Monroe, fifth President. Due to the fragile condition of Elizabeths health, many of the duties of official hostess were assumed by her eldest daughter, Eliza Monroe Hay.

Elizabeth first caught the attention of James Monroe in 1785 while he was in New York serving as a member of the Continental Congress. William Grayson, James Monroes cousin and fellow Congressman from Virginia, described Elizabeth and her sisters as having made so brilliant and lovely an appearance at a theater one evening, as to depopulate all the other boxes of all the genteel male people therein. James, age twentyseven, married Elizabeth, age seventeen, on February 16, 1786, at her fathers home in New York City. The marriage was performed by Reverend Benjamin Moore, and recorded in the parish records of Trinity Church, New York. After a brief honeymoon on Long Island, the newlyweds returned to New York to live with her father until Congress adjourned. Their first child, whom they named Eliza Kortright Monroe, was born in December, 1786, in Virginia.

Source: Wikipedia