Our first Lady 3

 Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson

This was such a odd story as Martha's mother died just 3 days after her birth and was raised by two stepmothers one of which was a mixed black slave whom her father married.

She herself married at 18 years old but her husband died just 1 year and 10 months after their wedding. She gave birth to one son and inherited the Forest Plantation.

At 23 years old she met and married Thomas Jefferson who was at the time a lawyer and a member of the House of Burgesses for Albemarle County at the forest plantation but moved to what would come to be known as Monticello.

The following is from this web site http://www.firstladies.org/biographies/firstladies.aspx?biography=3

Martha Jefferson's health began to rapidly deteriorate, the result likely of having given birth to seven children in less than fourteen years. The British invasion of Virginia under Lord Cornwallis in 1781 forced her to flee Monticello for their more isolated Bedford County home " Poplar Forest , and it weakened her 16-month old daughter Lucy, who died weeks later. Jefferson shortly thereafter resigned his position as governor and promised his wife that he would refuse any more political posts. Thus Jefferson turned down an important diplomatic mission to Europe. Her final pregnancy proved more burdensome than her marital separations; she died four months after childbirth. 

Martha Jefferson, however, was also to leave an unwitting legacy to her husband on two accounts. With the death of her father in 1772, Martha Jefferson inherited substantial property, including approximately 11,000 acres of land ( retaining 5,000 ) and slaves, including her half-siblings. By law, his wife's property became his own upon marriage, and so Jefferson came into ownership of his slave half sisters-in-law Thenia, Critta and Sally and brothers-in-law Robert and James Hemings. 

Since they were one-quarter African-American and three-quarters white and also related by blood to Martha Jefferson, the five Wayles-Hemings children occupied a unique role within the Jefferson family. None were called " slaves, " but always referred to as " servants. " They worked in the most personal and private servantile roles at Monticello. In 1790, Robert Hemings bought his freedom and joined his wife and daughter in Richmond, where they worked for a doctor. James Hemings was particularly close to Jefferson, working as his personal aide or " body servant, " traveling with him to Philadelphia during the Second Continental Congress and later to Europe. While in Paris, James Hemings studied the culinary French arts; upon returning to Virginia, he trained his younger brother Peter to oversee the detailed French cooking that Jefferson now insisted on serving. Jefferson gave James Hemings his freedom. Critta Hemings helped to raise her half-nieces Patsy and Polly. Thenia Hemings was the only one of Martha Jefferson's half-siblings who was sold as a slave - to family friend and future President James Monroe.

Thomas Jefferson never married again and while President the wife of his highest-ranking Cabinet member, Dolley Madison served as the public hostess.

There were no known pictures of Martha Jefferson and only a painted portrait done 183 years after her death based on descriptions of her.