Virginia Jefferson Randolph (Trist) (1801–82), the sixth child of Thomas Mann Randolph and TJ’s daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph, was born and lived at Monticello until the time of the first estate sale in January 1827. Like her sisters Ellen and Cornelia Randolph, Virginia occasionally accompanied her grandfather to his Poplar Forest retreat. An accomplished musician, she sang and played the harpsichord, piano, and guitar. Soon after Nicholas P. Trist met her in 1817, he asked her mother for permission to court her, but Martha persuaded him to wait. They were finally married at Monticello in September 1824, and their daughter Martha, the first of their three children, was born there just two months before TJ’s death. Her husband’s career led to extended residences in Washington, D.C., and Havana, Cuba. In 1839 Virginia Trist and her unmarried sisters Mary and Cornelia took two of the Trist children to be educated in Saint Servan, France, while the elder son Thomas Jefferson Trist attended a school for the deaf in Philadelphia. Leaving France in 1841, Virginia Trist rejoined her husband in Havana. The Trists subsequently lived in Washington, in New York, and in Pennsylvania, where Virginia and her sisters briefly operated a boarding school. The Trists were living in the Alexandria home of their daughter and son-in-law when they died, with Nicholas P. Trist predeceasing his wife in 1874 (Nicholas P. Trist to Martha Jefferson Randolph, 18, 20 Sept. 1818, Martha Jefferson Randolph to Nicholas P. Trist, [ca. 19 Sept. 1818], Cornelia J. Randolph to Virginia J. Randolph Trist, 21 Nov. 1826, Robley Dunglison to Nicholas P. Trist, 3 Jan. 1837 [1838], Virginia J. Randolph Trist to Nicholas P. Trist, 15 Mar., 10 May 1839, 30 Nov., 6 Dec. 1841, Ellen W. Randolph Coolidge to Virginia J. Randolph Trist, 23 July 1855, Martha J. Trist Burke to [Mary J. Randolph], 2 Nov. 1873 [all in NcU: NPT]; Shackelford, Descendants description begins George Green Shackelford, ed., Collected Papers … of the Monticello Association of the Descendants of Thomas Jefferson, 1965–84, 2 vols. description ends , 1:100–13, 231–2, 2:155; Helen Cripe, Thomas Jefferson and Music [1974; rev. ed. 2009], 41, 53–4, 63–7; Richmond Enquirer, 21 Sept. 1824, 3 Nov. 1826; ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends , 21:832–4; gravestone inscription in Ivy Hill Cemetery, Alexandria).

when you were here: Virginia Randolph and her mother had accompanied TJ to and from Poplar Forest a few weeks earlier (MB description begins James A. Bear Jr. and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826, 1997, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Second Series description ends , 2:1327; note to TJ to William Wirt, 29 Sept. 1816). During their 22–24 Oct. 1816 journey to his Bedford County estate, TJ and his granddaughters Cornelia and Ellen Randolph spent the night at Gibson’s ordinary in Buckingham County and Robert hunters establishment in Campbell County (MB description begins James A. Bear Jr. and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826, 1997, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Second Series description ends , 2:1328).