Bush is not the first presidential offspring to marry off the premises, and not the first Bush to keep the lid on. Her Aunt Dorothy, the president's sister, married quietly at Camp David in 1992 after divorcing her first husband.

Tricia Nixon's sister, Julie, opted for a small, private wedding with a presidential grandson, Dwight David Eisenhower II, after her father was elected but before his inauguration. Julie's 1968 ceremony at Manhattan's Marble Collegiate Church was the shortest in first family history at 15 minutes.

Other low-key presidential family weddings marked second or third marriages (Maureen Reagan) or were held away from the White House amid family tension (Maureen's half-sister, Patti Davis).

"The marriage of a presidential child is a very rare brief moment when a Republican can appreciate a Democrat and a Democrat can appreciate a Republican. You see the tear in Dad's eye," said Doug Wead, a former aide to the first President Bush and author of "All the Presidents' Children."

In the 19th century, the wedding of a president's daughter was sometimes considered a private, family affair. When President Monroe's 17-year-old daughter Maria Hester Monroe became the first child of a sitting chief executive to marry in the White House in 1820, the only press coverage was 34 words in a Washington paper.

There was much more interest by 1874, when President Ulysses S. Grant's daughter Nellie wed a young British diplomat, according to research in the 1960s by Ann Novotny and Wilbur Cross. And yet few dared to ask Cleveland a few years later about rumors of his impending marriage at age 49. He wed Frances Folsom, just shy of 22.

Maria Monroe's pushy, much older sister Eliza, who often functioned as first lady because of their mother's ill health, took over wedding planning and excluded the foreign diplomatic corps in an ongoing feud, angering the groom, junior White House aide Samuel L. Gouverneur, also a first cousin like Adams' bride eight years later.

Unlike Monroe, Bush seems firmly in charge of how she's going to get hitched, said Millie Martini Bratten, editor in chief of Brides magazine.

"How she chooses to reflect her own personality in this wedding will have an impact," Bratten said. "Many first daughters did not have a say."

The majority of first family weddings have been large and splashy.