Theodore Roosevelt's First Wife. Born Alice Hathaway Lee, she was a daughter of a prominent New England banking family. She met and married Theodore Roosevelt but only after he had proposed twice and endured an initial refusal. Married on his twenty-second birthday, Roosevelt was serving in the New York State Assembly as the birth of their first child approached. Alice became ill just prior to her due date. On February 11, 1884 she wrote, assuring her husband not to worry about her and that the doctor was not concerned over her illness. She sent a telegram to him in Albany informing him that his daughter had been born on February twelfth. A second telegram arrived informing him that Alice's health was failing. Theodore Roosevelt arrived at his house on the thirteenth and held vigil not only at his wife's bedside, but at his mother's who was fighting typhoid fever one floor below. At two o'clock in afternoon of the fourteenth, Alice succumbed to Bright's disease. Roosevelt's diary entry for that date was marked with a large black X followed by: "The light has gone out of my life." He could never again look at Alice's photographs and gave them away, and would seldom if ever mention her name again. He put his infant daughter in the care of his sister Anna for two years as he traveled to the Dakotas to escape his personal tragedy. The epitaph he included on his wife's memorial read, "For joy or for sorrow my life has now been lived out."
Bio by: Iola