Great x4 Grandmother Mary Emberry (nee Arscott)

My Great x4 Grandmother Mary (1793 - c 1850's) was a weaver, laundress, housewife and mother of four.

Mary was born around 1793 in Silverton, Devon, to John Arscott (about 38) and Sarah Arscott (nee Park) (about 37).

Mary was baptised on 7th April 1793 in Silverton.

Mary was the youngest of five children (four daughters and one son):

• Elizabeth  1779 -
• Sarah  1781 - 1781 (about six weeks old)
• William  1783 -
• Sarah  1790 - 1799 (nine years old)
• Mary  1793 - 

All five siblings were baptised in Silverton.

Sadly two of Mary's sisters passed away in childhood.

Nine years before Mary was born, her older sister Sarah passed away as a young baby. Sarah was baptised on 23rd September 1781 and buried, six weeks later, on 4th November 1781, in Silverton.

And in 1799, when Mary was about six years old, her closest sister Sarah (second of that name) passed away, aged only nine years old. This Sarah was buried on 11th July 1799, in Silverton. Twenty years later, Mary would name her first born daughter Sarah, likely after her lost sisters.

On 17th August 1817, Mary (about 24), a weaver and later a laundress, married John Emberry (about 21), a cordwainer (shoemaker), in Holy Trinity, Exeter. Both are described as residents of that parish.

Sometime after their marriage, John and Mary moved out from Exeter, and eight miles north, to begin their family life in her native Silverton, which is but a few miles from his native Cadbury.

Mary and John had at least four children:

• John  1827 - 1828 (fifteen months old)
• Sarah  1829 -
• Mary Ann  1831 -
• Thomas  1834 -

Whilst daughters Sarah and Mary Ann were baptised in Silverton, their youngest son Thomas was baptised in Brampford Speke, some four miles south-west of Silverton, implying the family may have moved in the early 1830's, but only locally.

It is possible John and Mary had more elder children, who were not baptised (John for example was not baptised, though we have record of his burial) or who did not survive, as the couple married a decade before the birth of their first known child John.

Though I cannot find record of his death, it seems Mary's husband John passed away sometime in the late 1830's, likely in his early forties, as he can no longer be found with Mary and his young children come the 1841 census, and Mary is described as a widow come the more detailed 1851 census.

1841 Census:

By the time of the 1851 census, Mary was living back in the city of Exeter, now in Coombe Street, St Mary Major, with her daughter Mary Ann, and Mary Ann's young family. Now in her late fifties, she was working as a laundress.

1851 Census:

Coombe Street, where the family lived, was described as being "at the heart of the West Quarter" by Exeter Memories. Picture the scene:

"The 18th Century saw the whole of the West Quarter slip from a favoured place for merchants to live and trade, to a place for a growing, often deprived, working population. Tanneries, foundries, soap and candle makers, sawmills, coal yards and warehouses were developed in Shilhay in the 19th Century. Coombe Street saw tenements and houses built along the street and off little alleys on each side - any spare piece of land would be filled with a terrace or tenement to provide a landlord with income. It has been described as Dickensian, with low pay and unemployment creating poverty, overcrowding and deprivation."

Although I cannot find a record of death, Mary appears on no later records, so may well have passed away, in her late fifties or early sixties, in the 1850's, in or near Exeter.