Narrative by (DS):
MARY ANN GUMMET, although destined to have a childless marriage, seems to have assumed a pivotal role in the Gummet family, her name appearing in numerous kindly capacities as events unrolled and time took its toll.
Mary Ann had been born on the 14th June 1813. Her parents had by this time moved up from the river in Wapping to live in an area which in the modern day we would call Stepney. She would have been 9 years old when her father died and 14 when her mother remarried in 1827. It is not clear where Henrietta's three younger children, including Mary Ann, lived after 1827. Did her second husband, John DALTON, take them in? Probably for a time.
For Mary Ann, life changed in 1836 upon her marriage to JACOB STEPHEN HORE at St. George's church. Jacob, thirteen years her senior, was another Mariner whose family came from Shaldon in Devon and he seems often to have been away at sea. Jacob and Mary Ann came to live in Betts Street, a typical East End backstreet of terraced houses off the main 'Highway'.
Joining Mary Ann and Jacob at 13 Betts Street were her two younger siblings, 18 year-old JAMES GUMMET and 15 year-old ANN FRANCES GUMMET. Following the death of John DALTON, her mother Henrietta joined them.
In 1845, ANN FRANCES GUMMET left to marry and, on the 19th January 1846, it was MARY ANN who was present at the death of her niece (William and Catherine’s 3 year-old daughter, MARY FRANCES GUMMET) at 13 Betts Street.
With William's family expanding, Jacob and Mary Ann (although it seems to be Mary Ann mostly as Jacob seemed always away at sea) moved along the street to number 5. There may have been an additional reason. Mary Ann's newly-married sister, Ann Frances, after bearing two sons in the four years of her marriage, had just become widowed and so, in 1850, the sisters again joined forces domestically.
Soon after 1853, they moved again to number 33 Betts Street. Ann Frances had remarried but, like Mary Ann's husband Jacob, her new husband was a Mariner and so, for the most part, the two married women ran the household. Jacob was approaching 60 years of age by this time and possibly was going to sea less and was, in that year's census, at home for the first recorded time, recorded as a 'Merchant Seaman' and later as 'Ship Keeper retired'.
Mary Ann, now 48, was seemingly past child-bearing. Later in the 1860s, she moved with Jacob to 66 Copley Street in Mile End Old Town, a short distance from St. Dunstan’s church, earning some livelihood as a 'Needlewoman'.
Although the younger by thirteen years, Mary Ann died first, in 1875 aged 62. Jacob died the following year, by then 76.
With no children of her own, Mary Ann seems to have been the homemaker and carer for her wider family for the latter forty years of her life.
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