Biography

A beloved wife and mother, Cornelia Vredenburgh Weed was the 75-year-old widow of Walter Weed, who had predeceased her six years earlier. The daughter of the prominent Col. William John Vredenburgh of nearby Skaneateles and his first wife, the former Elizabeth Townsend of Oyster Bay, Long Island, Mrs. Weed was one of six children born to the couple: two boys (who died in infancy) and four girls. Although the Vredenburgh sisters all survived to adulthood, they were still young children when they suffered the loss of their mother in 1798. The following year their widowed father married the former Mary Rozier Gilzean of Newton, Long Island, with whom he eventually had two more children.
On Christmas Eve 1810, when Cornelia Vredenburgh was not yet 18 years old, she wed Walter Weed, a 28-year-old merchant from Albany, and their marriage endured more than half a century. Notables among her many relations include her brother-in-law, New York Governor Enos Thompson Throop, who was the husband of her younger sister Evelina, and her niece, the Victorian era novelist Eliza Townsend Porter Beach, who was the daughter of her sister Elizabeth. Interred beside her husband, the inscription on her deteriorating marble monument reads "Our Mother".