When Barbara VornDick lifted a yellowed letter from a gray archival box at William & Mary, she didn’t expect to feel a voice grab her by the collar. The handwriting was frantic, the words desperate. “I am now in distress, in ill health, & in a foreign country,” the writer pleaded. It was 1839. The author was Eliza Monroe Hay — the eldest daughter of the fifth U.S. president — stranded in Paris and begging for help.
Most historians had written her off as arrogant and aloof, the kind of woman history likes to flatten into a single line. But the more VornDick read, the less sense that story made. Something was wrong. The letter sounded less like pride and more like panic.
And so began a six-year obsession that turned a retired schoolteacher into a detective, genealogist, and accidental diplomat — all in the name of bringing a long-forgotten daughter of America home.
The First Modern First Family
By the time James Monroe took office in 1817, the presidency had shifted from small-republic formality to full-scale spectacle. Dolley Madison had made politics social, throwing grand parties that defined Washington society. The Monroes wanted something quieter, more dignified, maybe even a little European.
The problem was that Mrs. Monroe was too ill to play hostess. So her daughter, Eliza, stepped in — and the critics never forgave her for it.
She’d grown up in Paris, schooled among diplomats’ children, fluent in French manners and sharp repartee. Her closest friend was Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of Empress Joséphine and stepdaughter of Napoleon. That friendship carried Eliza into Europe’s inner circles, but it didn’t play well in the young American republic.
At the White House, she enforced social protocol the way she’d learned abroad — invitations limited, rank respected, no backslapping congressmen dropping by for dinner. It made her sound haughty in a culture that valued “plainness” as a moral virtue. Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, wrote of her: “So full of agreeables & disagreeables… so proud & so mean.” Washington society didn’t do nuance then, either.
The Lost Years
After Monroe left office, Eliza devoted herself to family — nursing her ailing parents, then her husband, George Hay, who died within days of her mother. She was the one who sat by sickbeds, who handled the practical burdens that history never credits.
When her father died in 1831, she expected her share of his modest estate. But the executor, her brother-in-law Samuel Gouverneur (also her cousin), delayed everything—years dragged by. Letters went unanswered.
VornDick discovered that Gouverneur was a gambler and a man perpetually in debt — the kind who might easily justify “borrowing” from family accounts. By 1839, Eliza’s patience and finances were gone. She had raised grandchildren, cared for the dying, and now found herself penniless. She left for France — maybe hoping her old friends could help, maybe hoping to recover her health. Instead, she landed in a cheap apartment at 62 Champs-Élysées, the future site of a Tiffany store, writing letters she couldn’t afford to mail.
Her words to the French king, Louis Philippe I, sound weary but proud: America offers no help “to the children of its rulers,” she wrote, appealing for a room in one of his palaces. The king never answered. Within months she was dead — buried without a headstone in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery.
A Voice From the Dust
That would have been the end of it, if not for one woman with a curious streak and too much heart to leave the past alone.
VornDick had spent decades teaching elementary school, raising three kids mostly on her own, hiking backcountry trails, and digging at archaeological sites for fun. She was the kind of person who couldn’t pass a locked drawer without wondering what was inside. So when she found those desperate letters, she couldn’t stop thinking about the woman behind them.
The more she researched, the more human Eliza became. Far from an aloof aristocrat, she looked like a woman crushed between expectation and circumstance — educated, outspoken, and punished for both.
When the French government warned the James Monroe Museum in Fredericksburg that Eliza’s crumbling grave might soon be cleared and the bones moved to an ossuary, VornDick decided that wasn’t going to happen. Not to the daughter of a U.S. president. Not to someone who’d already been erased once.
The Bringing Eliza Home Project
Her campaign started with a single conversation. Kathryn Willis, a retired communications executive living part-time in Paris, had cleaned the tomb herself years earlier, pulling away moss and setting a temporary marker. When she met VornDick, the two decided Eliza deserved better than neglect and a foreign field.
From there, the effort grew into a community of women — historians, volunteers, museum staff, even a local funeral director — all working to repatriate Eliza’s remains. VornDick traced more than 30 living descendants across the U.S., each of whom was required by French law to give written permission for the exhumation. She even found descendants of Daniel Brent, the diplomat who had initially purchased the grave plots for American expatriates. It took months of letters and legal work to secure consent from just one relative — but that was enough.
When bureaucracy slowed things down, VornDick remembered Eliza’s own words from that final letter: “Much of human life, my friend, is spent in lamentation & in inaction, but that is not my character.”
She took that as marching orders.
Coming Home
On May 21 of this year, at Dulles International Airport, a small wooden casket arrived from France. A brass plate read: Elizabeth Hay née Monroe 1786–1840. VornDick stood there in red, white, and blue, shaking with emotion. When the funeral home director lifted the box, cargo workers asked if she was family. She almost said yes.
For six years, she’d lived with Eliza — her words, her pain, her stubbornness. Maybe that’s what kinship really is: the choice to care about someone history forgot.
The remains now rest temporarily in Fredericksburg, waiting for their final burial beside James Monroe and his wife at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond. On October 23, 185 years after her death, Eliza Monroe Hay will take her place next to her parents ‘ home at last.
The Larger Story
VornDick’s research didn’t just reclaim one woman’s dignity; it reopened a question about how America treats its own. We celebrate presidents but rarely remember the lives orbiting them — the daughters, wives, and widows who carried the emotional and financial burdens of power without any of its protections.
Eliza’s story exposes that gap in our collective memory. She wasn’t a tragic footnote. She was a casualty of the early republic’s indifference to women’s security. As VornDick said, “If this could happen to the daughter of a president — to have her inheritance denied, to die a pauper in Paris — imagine what happened to ordinary women.”
History likes clean narratives. But life isn’t tidy, and Eliza’s letters make that clear. They show a woman whose pride came from survival, whose “airs” were armor, whose loneliness was real. In rediscovering her, VornDick didn’t just close a genealogical loop; she restored empathy to the record.
Maybe that’s the real lesson buried in those letters — that history’s forgotten women still speak, if someone’s willing to listen long enough.
Attribution:
Adapted from reporting by The Washington Post’s Gregory S. Schneider.