Katelyn Bennett Whatley and Benjamin Tydings Smith were married Sept. 15 in Easton, Md. William G. Smith, who is a Universal Life minister and a half brother of the groom, performed the ceremony at the home of the groom’s parents.
Mrs. Smith, 31, is a patent examiner at the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Va. She graduated from North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
She is the daughter of Debra D. Whatley and Dr. Ralph E. Whatley III of Roanoke, Va. The bride’s father, a pulmonologist, is the senior vice president for education and research at Carilion Clinic and is also a professor of medicine at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, both in Roanoke.
Mr. Smith, also 31, is a managing director and a buyer representative at MGA, a commercial real estate firm in Washington. He graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine.
He is the son of Mary Tydings Smith and John T. Smith II. The groom’s mother is a senior director at Russell Reynolds Associates, an executive search firm in Washington. His father retired as a partner in Covington & Burling, the Washington law firm.
The groom is also a grandson of Joseph D. Tydings of Washington, who served as a United States senator from Maryland from 1965 to 1971, and of the late Gerard C. Smith, who also lived in Easton, and was the chief nuclear arms negotiator for the United States in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that led to the antiballistic missile treaty of 1972.
The couple met in August 2011, when mutual friends introduced them at an end-of-summer party hosted by Mr. Smith at his parents’ home. “She was trying to teach all of my friends how to water ski, which I appreciated,” he said.
A week or so later, they were on the same bus, again with a group of friends, to Washington for a Temptations concert. Soon after, they had their first date at a Luke’s Lobster shack in Washington.
