Martha Wayles was born on October 30, 1748, at The Forest plantation in Charles City County, Virginia. She was the daughter of John Wayles, a wealthy attorney, planter, and slave trader, and his first wife, Martha Eppes Wayles. Her mother died shortly after her birth. John Wayles married twice more, and Martha grew up within a complicated blended household shaped by repeated maternal loss. As the daughter of a prosperous Virginia gentleman, Martha received a private education at home. She learned reading, writing, religion, household management, sewing, music, and the social accomplishments expected of a planter’s daughter. She became especially skilled at the harpsichord and singing. Her education prepared her to supervise a large household and entertain within gentry society rather than to pursue a public profession. The Wayles family’s wealth depended upon plantations, legal business, Atlantic commerce, and enslaved labor. John Wayles fathered children with Betty Hemings, an enslaved woman of mixed ancestry. Those children, including Sally Hemings, were Martha’s half-siblings, although Virginia law treated them as property. This family reality became historically important when the Hemings family later entered Thomas Jefferson’s household. In 1766 Martha married Bathurst Skelton, a young planter and attorney. They had a son, John, but Skelton died in 1768 and the child died several years later. Martha thus experienced widowhood and bereavement before age twenty-five. As a widow with property, she possessed greater legal and social independence than an unmarried woman, though male relatives still influenced estate affairs. Thomas Jefferson began courting her, and they married on January 1, 1772. Before becoming associated with Monticello and the revolutionary statesman, Martha had already been shaped by maternal loss, a complex slaveholding family, elite domestic and musical education, early marriage, motherhood, widowhood, and the death of a child.