The daughter of former President James Monroe will be buried in Virginia 200 years after she died alone in France

The daughter of former President James Monroe will be buried in the same Virginia cemetery as her father on Thursday, finally reuniting with the couple two centuries after she was stranded in France and left in an unmarked grave.

Eliza Monroe Hay died at the age of 53 in 1840, while – unbeknownst to many of her friends and family – desperately trying to find a way back to the United States.

Two letters in College of William and MaryPenned by Hay, the archives reveal her tragic fate nearly 200 years later.

Barbara Vorendyke, a retired teacher and author of “The True Story of Eliza: The First Biography of President Monroe’s Eldest Daughter,” unearthed the dusty letters and sought to set the record straight.

The eldest daughter of the fifth president of the United States is often described as a narcissistic socialite who fled abroad in search of riches, which she apparently did not actually provide by being part of the country’s most powerful lineage.

However, in her letters, Hay pleads for help, asking their recipients to “save me from utter ruin.”

“I am now in distress, in ill health, and in a foreign country,” Hay wrote in a letter in 1839.

The Monroe family was intimately familiar with France after the patriarch served as its minister under President George Washington, and again when he was appointed by President Thomas Jefferson between France, Britain, and Spain.

Meanwhile, Hay spent most of her adolescence at school in France, and even became friends with the would-be Queen of the Netherlands.

During James Monroe’s presidency, his wife was often too ill to serve as a proper first lady, so Hay stepped in alongside her husband and helped shape the image of a true presidential first family.

However, the first daughter started causing controversy when she planned her younger sister Maria’s wedding. She aimed to keep the guest list short, thus excluding many politicians and diplomats who apparently thought they were obligated to receive an invitation.

Future First Lady Louisa Adams said of Hay in 1820: “This woman is composed of many great and small qualities, so full of agreeables and disagreeables, so witty and ill-bred, so much reason and so little judgment, so proud, which is to say I have seldom met with such a combination.”

VornDick noticed Hay’s devotion to her family, and was skeptical of accounts that she would suddenly choose to venture to Europe.

During her time in France, Hay wrote in her last letters that she had been deceived and was constantly fighting for mere scraps of her father’s estate.

After his death in 1831, the James Monroe estate came under the control of Maria Monroe’s husband and Hay’s brother-in-law, Samuel Gouverneur – who was also the sisters’ cousin.

Vorendeck learned that Gouverneur, who had never gotten along with Hay, had a habitual gambling problem. He was even investigated by the federal government for fraud, but he used his position to prevent the sale of the president’s papers, which would have provided the income on which Hay was counting.

It was not put up for sale until after Hay’s death.

Vorendyke discovered that Hay, despite her supposed notoriety, had spent most of her life caring for others, including working as a temporary caregiver for her parents and husband. Her daughter Hortensia also died young, so Hay was tasked with caring for her three grandchildren.

With all the responsibilities of caring for others, much of the First Daughter’s fortune had dried up by 1838. Her health was also failing, and she had no resources to care for herself. So, she sailed to France in the hopes that family connections would help, according to Vorendijk’s research.

Instead, she died alone and was buried in an unmarked grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Hay Cemetery has fallen into such disrepair over the years that French officials wrote to the James Monroe Museum and Memorial Library in 2018 to inform them that they would soon have to exhume the remains, place them in an ossuary and resell the plot.

From there, a woman who knew Vorendyke as a resident expert on Hay told her about the cemetery, and the couple began the process of repatriating her remains through the Bringing Eliza Home Project.

“If this could happen to a president’s daughter, she could end up being completely disinherited and end up as a pauper dying far from home — we know this happened to other women during that era. This is an important aspect of women’s history in America,” Vorendyke said. The Washington Post.

Hay will finally be properly buried at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond on October 23 alongside her family.