The Brookses were a wealthy family, highly regarded in Boston society. The family’s status was solidified, not only by its wealth, but by ancestral connections to families such as the Boylstons, Cottons, Gardners, and Saltonstalls. Her courtship to a nineteen-year-old Charles Francis Adams began in early 1827 while visiting her sister Charlotte, married to Edward Everett, in Washington. The couple fell in love quickly upon meeting and within a month Charles had proposed, and she accepted, pending her father’s approval. Peter Chardon Brooks doted on this youngest daughter, and was at first reluctant to give his consent when news of the courtship reached him in Boston. After consulting with then President John Quincy Adams, Brooks gave his consent for Abigail “to act at her pleasure” provided that the couple wait two years for Charles to reach the age of 21 and establish his law practice. As they waited, Abigail and Charles exchanged numerous love letters, expressing heartfelt sentiments and tenderness as they anticipated their life together. After their wedding on 3 September 1829, the couple moved into a house on Hancock Avenue in Boston to begin what was a happy and affectionate marriage. While Abigail sometimes struggled with her health and spirits, particularly while their seven children were small, she was lively and social, and prevented Charles from becoming the social recluse he might otherwise have become. She also took interest in civic service. A notice in the Quincy Patriot of 13 November 1858 shows her serving as the county manager for the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, calling for subscriptions to help preserve George Washington’s Mount Vernon mansion for future generations. Adams supported Charles in his political endeavors and when he was sent as Minister to the Court of St. James at the onset of the Civil War, Abigail accompanied him. Her nephew, William Everett described those years in her obituary printed in the New England Historic and Genealogical Register of July 1889 praising her for “maintaining her country’s honor in the most trying circumstances of English social life, where the aristocratic sentiment was notoriously hostile, with a combination of generosity, playfulness, frankness, constancy, culture and dignity.” Abigail Brooks Adams’s old age was one largely of poor health and decline for both her and Charles, his mentally, hers physically and emotionally. After he passed in 1886, Abigail’s health and spirits declined rapidly, until she too passed away at the Old House in Quincy on 6 June 1889.