|
|
|
|
|
The story of Mary Mears and her family
The story of Mary Mears and her immediate family has been the most difficult of all the Mears families to research and piece together. To find the beginning of Mary’s story it was necessary to start at the end, but even here there is a conflict of evidence in the records. The death certificate of Mary Mears states that she died on 22nd March 1881, but the burial record states that Mary was buried on 27th March 1880 (one year before she died). However, the year on the death certificate is probably the correct year because the parish register for Chilcompton where Mary’s burial is recorded has the year 1880 written at the top of the page, and this would have referred to the first entry on that page. The registrar who entered Mary’s burial must have forgotten to alter the year further down that page. One thing that is the same in both records is that Mary Mears died at the age of 82. This was her age at death although her 83rd birthday may have been only a few months, or just a few weeks away. The census records also give a clue as to the year that Mary was born. The 1841 census isn’t much help because it only gives approximate ages (usually to the nearest 10 years) and states that Mary was 40 years old. The 1851 census is much more accurate giving Mary’s age as 53 and this was probably her true age at that time. In 1861 Mary was living with her brother and his wife, and one of these two people may have given the enumerator Mary’s age. This was rather excessively put at 67 years. In 1871 Mary was living alone and would, therefore, have personally told the enumerator how old she was. This is recorded as 73 years, which ties in exactly with that of the 1851 census. As the census records were taken every ten years, usually in early to mid April, depending on how long it took the enumerator to go around all the houses in his district, this means that Mary was probably born about April or May 1798 Unfortunately no baptism records have been found for Mary Mears and so we cannot tell for certain who her parents were. However, there were very few people with the surname of Mears living in the Chilcompton area of Somerset in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and those who were recorded would probably have been members of the same family. Apart from Mary, there was also a male by the name of James Mears who was born about 1804 and we know from the 1861 census that he was Mary’s brother. There was also a female by the name of Elizabeth who was very well recorded and she is the only one of the three for whom a baptism record has so far been found. She was born on the 16th May 1807 and baptised on the 13th June that same year. As this child was baptised at only four weeks of age, this indicates that she may have been weak or sick and was not expected to live very long. She did in fact die when she was less than four years old and was buried on the 4th February 1811 in Chilcompton. As her birth came soon after that of the births of Mary and James, and there were no other Mears’s recorded in the Chilcompton area at that time (other than the parents of Elizabeth) we can be reasonably certain that Elizabeth was the younger sister of Mary and James. The baptism and burial records for Elizabeth show that she was the daughter of Robert and Mary Mears, so possibly Robert and Mary were also the parents of Mary and James. Mary (the mother) died in 1829 and was buried in Chilcompton on 18th October that year, although she was recorded as being a resident of Midsomer Norton. Her age was given as 60 years, which means that she would have been born about 1769. Her husband Robert died four years later and was buried in Chilcompton on 2nd August 1833. He was also registered as being a resident of Midsomer Norton and his age was given as 70 years. This means that Robert would have been born about the year 1763, but no records of the baptisms of either Robert or Mary have yet been found, so we don’t know where either of them came from, or when they were married. As for the daughter Mary (our earliest known direct ancestor in the Mears line), she died at the age of 82 and was never married. She did however have at least seven children during her lifetime and it is her son James who is the ancestor of our branch of the Mears family. He may have been named after his father, or possibly after Mary’s brother James who was married to a woman by the name of Mary Lovell. |