Nabby Adams Smith
(1765-1813)
BIRTH
July 14, 1765
Braintree, Massachusetts
Abigail Adams
FATHER
John Adams
(1735-1826)
MOTHER
Abigail Smith Adams
(1744-1818)
BROTHER
John Adams Sr.
(1691-1761)
BROTHER
John Quincy Adams
(1767-1848)
BROTHER
Charles Adams
(1770-1800)
BROTHER
Thomas Boylston Adams
(1772-1832)
HUSBAND
William Stephens Smith
(1755-1816)
Children
Caroline Amelia Smith De Windt
(1795-1852)
Abigail “Nabby” Adams Smith (1765–1813) was the eldest child of John and Abigail Adams. She traveled with her mother to Europe, recording observations of society in France and Britain in her diaries and letters. In London she married William Stephens Smith, and they later settled in New York and raised four children. Financial troubles strained the marriage. She returned to her parents’ home during treatment for breast cancer and died in Quincy in 1813.
BORN
Abigail Adams
Braintree, Massachusetts
NICKNAMES
Nabby
Married Name
Abigail Smith
John Quincy Adams Birthplace
133 Franklin St, Quincy, MA 02169
The family lived in this home during the time John Adams helped found the United States with his work on the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolutionary War. His own birthplace is only 75 feet (23 m) away, on the same property.
MUSEUM
Surviving Structures, Gift Shop, Tours, Programs, Exhibits
Abigail "Nabby" Adams Smith was born on Jul 14, 1765 in Braintree, Massachusetts. The surviving biographical summary provides only limited evidence about childhood, schooling, and the daily circumstances of the household, so those details are not reconstructed here without documentation. What can be stated securely is that this person belonged to the interconnected family world from which HistoryGPS traces participants, relatives, and later descendants of the Revolutionary generation.
The available biographical record identifies Abigail "Nabby" Adams Smith with work or public activity as a hostess. Those roles provide the clearest documented basis for including this person in the database and should be read in the political, military, professional, or household context of the period. Abigail "Nabby" Adams Smith died on Aug 15, 1813 in Quincy, Massachusetts. Additional claims about employment, public service, or accomplishments have been omitted where the consulted source did not support them.
CAREER
DEATH
The available biographical record identifies Abigail "Nabby" Adams Smith with work or public activity as a hostess. Additional claims about employment, public service, or accomplishments have been omitted where the consulted source did not support them. In 1810, Smith was diagnosed with breast cancer. On October 8, 1811, a mastectomy was performed by John Warren and several assistants without any anesthesia in an upstairs room of the Adams home. In 1812, Smith finally started to feel well and returned to the family farm in New York. In early 1813, she began feeling pain in her abdomen and spine, as well as suffering from painful headaches. At first a local doctor in New York said that the pain was from rheumatism, but later that year new tumors began to appear in the scar tissue as well as on her skin. She then returned to Quincy, telling her husband that she preferred to die at her parents' home. She died on August 15, 1813, at the age of 48. She was buried at Hancock Cemetery in Quincy. The available biographical account does not describe a continuous final medical course. It gives no dependable sequence of treatment and last symptoms from which to reconstruct a more detailed bedside narrative.
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