“My father and my mother were born in the same year—that of 1790, he being from the 29th March to the 12th November older than she was. They were married on father’s twenty-third birthday following that of his birth, after a courtship and engagement of nearly five years. He met her for the first time at a private party in the neighborhood, while on a visit to ‘Greenway,’ the home residence of grandfather Tyler, in Charles City county, adjoining that of New Kent, where grandfather Christian resided at ‘Cedar Grove.’ He had already taken his collegiate degrees at William and Mary College when scarcely more than seventeen years old, and was at the time a law student in Richmond, under the special office counsel and instruction of the celebrated Edmund Randolph, justly esteemed as the father of the Constitution of the United States, as Mr. Jefferson was of the Declaration of American Independence, and who had been the Attorney-General of President Washington, and the Secretary of State of President Jefferson, my grandfather Tyler being Governor of Virginia, and then residing in Richmond. After their troth was plighted, he had been twice or thrice elected to the State Legislature before their marriage was solemnized; and his last visit to her at ‘Cedar Grove’ was only three weeks before the wedding, yet I have heard him repeatedly say that, ‘then, for the first time, he ventured to kiss her hand on parting, so perfectly reserved and modest had she always been.’ “My mother’s mother was Mary Brown, of the same family with that of the late Judge John Brown, of Williamsburg, and Professor Dabney Brown, of William and Mary College, the former of whom finally moved to Kentucky, and the latter more recently to California; and with that of the Hon. James Halyburton, late Judge of the United States District Court of Virginia, and of the Hon. John M. Gregory, late Judge of the Henrico Circuit and Governor of Virginia; and as to the late Judge Christian, and the present Judge Christian, of the Peninsular Circuit and of the General Court of Virginia, the first was her son, and the last her cousin, as are also the present Doctors William and Edward Warren, formerly of Edenton, North Carolina, whither they moved from New Kent in Virginia, but now of Baltimore.” Not long after her marriage, Mrs. Tyler had the misfortune to lose both of her parents, and now having two less to love in this world, she freely gave the share which had been theirs, to her husband and her children, and to her sisters and her brothers. In truth, at no period of her life does it seem that she existed for herself, but only for those near and dear to her.