Mary was born at Dedham, the daughter of Thomas and Sarah Mason and baptised at St Mary’s church on 19 April 1791, aged four. So she was born in 1786/7.

On 28 December 1813, she married a local farmer, George Blomfield (c.1782–1844), at St Mary’s Dedham. The witnesses were Harriet and James Mason and John Blomfield. The Blomfields were a long-established and extensive family of nonconformists in Colchester, Dedham and Ardleigh and are mentioned in the Dedham Poll Book for 1798 as near neighbours of the Masons.

In 1851 Mary was a sixty-three-year-old farmer’s widow, living at Coopers Lane, Dedham, with her sons John (thirty-two) and Robert (twenty-eight). Ten years on she was living on Dedham High Road, her age given as seventy, which is likely wrong.

A Mary Bloomfield (not Blomfield) was buried at Colchester early in 1863, aged seventy-four, according to the National Burial Index. This could be her (as there is no-one by this name and of this age in northeast Essex in the 1861 census). If her age was given correctly here it would mean her year of birth was 1788/9.

Incidentally, there is another Mary Blomfield of a similar age (born at Stanway, Colchester) in the 1841/51/61/71 censuses, living at East Hill and Queen Street, Colchester (a few doors along from Sarah Tayler, née Mason, in 1861). She was married to a John Blomfield when the 1841 census was taken and was thereafter a widowed annuitant and died in 1877, aged ninety-six. She may well have been a relative: George Blomfield had a brother called John. In 1851/61 she had a young servant called Mary Ann Mason (born at Colchester) living with her. Was this just coincidence?