John Smith's Family Tree Website

Mason family

* * *

Part 1: Isaac Mason Jr (c1814 - c1904)

Working life and marriage to Ann Collicott

Isaac Mason was the second child of Isaac Mason Sr and Ann Collicott. He was baptised 04 September 1814 in Tamerton Foliott Parish Church, Devon. Like his father and brothers, he was an agricultural labourer. He married Frances Howell (c1806 - c1873) 18 October 1835 at Tamerton Foliott Parish Church. Almost nothing is known about Frances (or ‘Fanny’ as she was also known as). Her parents were John Howell and Ann (maiden name unknown). She was baptised in Tamerton Foliott 08 June 1806.

Isaac and Frances had four children: Isaac, John, William and Ann. They lived with Isaac’s parents initially in Cottage House on North Coombe Farm, Porsham Lane. They stayed living there after the senior Masons moved out. By 1861 Isaac Jr was farming 14 acres [1] and employing one man. Farms between 5 and 50 acres (or 5 and 100 depending on the author) were considered ‘small farms’. Other farms nearby were up to 50 acres and they might all have been tenant farmers for a large landowner. Only land cultivated for crops and grass was included in census returns (not hill pastures) so it is not known how much land the Masons actually lived and worked on. [2] Frances died c1873, aged 66, and Isaac continued farming for another decade or so before retiring to live by himself near the Seven Stars Inn in Tamerton Foliott. He died c1904, aged 89.

Children of Isaac and Ann

Isaac (c1837 - 1866) was baptised 11 February 1838 at Tamerton Foliott Parish Church. From his teens, he worked as a farm labourer. He later boarded with a baker and his family in Melbourne Place, Plymouth and four years later married their daughter, dressmaker Elizabeth Hake Scoble (1832 - 1911) 16 June 1864 at St Peter’s Parish Church. They continued living with her parents and only had one child: Isaac Walter Scoble (1865 - 1866) who sadly died aged 11 months and was buried in a common grave in Ford Park Cemetery, Plymouth. Isaac died just weeks before his son, aged 28, and was buried 20 March 1866. Their joint memorial reference was: section AH, number 5, row 66. Elizabeth stayed living with her widowed mother making dresses but also expanded her repertoire to be a milliner, fashioning hats. In 1877, she remarried retired yeoman farmer John Dyer (c1823 - ?). He died between 1891 and 1901 and Elizabeth set up as a newsagency out of her home in Keswick Avenue. She died in 1911, aged 79.

John (1840 - 1841) was baptised 26 April 1840 in Tamerton Foliott Parish Church. Sadly he died a year later and was buried 28 June 1841, aged 1 year and three months.

More information about William (c1842 - 1914) appears in Part 3.

Ann (1846 - 1873) was baptised 28 June 1846 in Tamerton Foliott Parish Church. She married ship rigger James Cornish (c1842 - ?) 24 September 1871 at Stoke Damerel Parish Church. Sadly Ann died less than two years later, aged 26, and was buried 25 April 1873 in Ford Park Cemetery, Plymouth. She was buried in a ‘chosen’ grave (as opposed to a common grave) with the memorial reference: section AL, number 1, row 5. It is not known what happened to her husband James.

Next: William Mason

Footnotes

[1] 14 acres is approximately 5½ hectares; 1 acre is the size of a soccer pitch or 16 tennis courts (comparison provided by www.worldlandtrust.org). 

[2] ‘Farm Size in England and Wales, from Early Victorian Times to the Present’ by David Grigg, 

the Agricultural History Review, Vol. 35, No. 2 (1987), pp. 179-189