Portrait of Mrs. Robert Walter Weir, c1885. Susan Martha Bayard was born in 1817. She taught school before joining the household of Robert W. Weir in 1845 to help raise his nine children after the death of his first wife. On July 15, 1846, they were married, and she bore him seven more children. Most of the sons followed military careers, but John Ferguson Weir, a child of the first marriage, and J. Alden Weir, her youngest son, became artists. Mrs. Weir died in 1900.