When Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) retired from the presidency in 1809 and returned to Monticello to live year-round for the first time since 1796, his domestic world was expansive and complex. His wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson (1748–1782), had been dead for nearly twenty-seven years, but his oldest daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph (1772–1836), her husband, Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. (1768–1828), and their eleven children joined the Monticello household, as did Jefferson’s sister Anna Marks (1755–1828), and, eventually, a grandson-in-law, his grandmother, and three great-grandchildren.1
