ABSTRACT
Abigail Smith was born on November 11, 1744, in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and died a little less than seventy- four years later in nearby Quincy, on October 28, 1818. She was the daughter of a Congregational minister, William Smith, and of Elizabeth Quincy Smith, and the granddaughter of]ohn Quincy, a prominent citizen of colonial Massachusetts, for whom she named her eldest son. In 1764 she married John Adams, then a virtually unknown attorney from Braintree, who became the second president of the United States in 1797. They had four surviving children, one of whom, John Quincy Adams, became the sixth president of the United States in 1825. She thus became the first woman to be both the wife and the mother of a president.
