Phoebe Simson Maria Roberts was born  at West Square, Southwark on 29 August 1849, the eldest daughter of James Mackenzie and Phoebe Roberts. 

She rarely used the Simson middle name it seems and, to avoid confusion with her mother, was known by her second middle name, Maria: ‘dear Maria’, as it says on her gravestone.

Maria grew up at the family home, Heath Cottage, at Dedham, Essex but moved to London after the death of her father in 1890, where she worked as a school governess. In 1891 she was lodging with her brother, the veterinary surgeon Arthur Mason Roberts at Belsize Road, off Abbey Road, St John’s Wood.

By the Edwardian period, James Mackenzie’s two daughters and youngest son were very much a London branch of the family. 

In 1901 Maria was in a single room at number 9 Holtham Road (now demolished). She was a fifty-one-year-old spinster and ‘daily governess, of private means’ – in other words, she worked for herself, resided at one place and travelled to another place to teach.

Maria died unmarried on 16 September 1903, at Holtham Road. Her grave is in Hampstead Cemetery.

She left her modest savings of  £328 14s to her spinster sister, Mary.