Lydia Hough (maiden name: Boss) was born around 1828 in Leesburg, Virginia, to Samuel Matthew Boss and Elizabeth Fox. Her father was a merchant who owned $6,650 of personal property in 1860. She grew up in Leesburg, and she married Benjamin Franklin Hough there on July 5, 1854. By the early 1860s, they were probably living in Maryland, and they may have been living in Washington, D.C., in 1874. She probably died sometime after 1874.