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John Tayler junior was baptised at Dedham on 28 July 1795 and was almost twenty years old when his father, John Tayler senior, died in July 1815. The following year he married Sarah Mason at Brightlingsea church, on 22 December 1816.

John and Sarah lived not far from Dedham, at Ardleigh. John is not included in the 1811 Ardleigh census, but in the 1821 Ardleigh census he is listed as a ‘gentleman’.

They had a typically large family, born between 1818 and 1831. Most of their children were born and privately baptised at the Essex village of Elmstead. Sarah had family at Elmstead Hall (had she been baptised there herself, as there is no apparent baptism record at Dedham?), and travelled the short distance from Ardleigh to give birth (Sarah was visiting Elmstead Hall when the 1851 census was taken).

In 1841 John and Sarah were living on the Lawford turnpike road in Ardleigh. John is of ‘independent’ means. However when the 1851 and 1861 censuses were taken – the children having left home (or died) – John and Sarah appear to be living separately. In 1851 the fifty-six-year-old John, listed as a ‘former farmer’, was a ‘visitor’ (or possibly a resident?) at the Globe Hotel, in North Street, Colchester. The publican at the Globe at this time was Thomas Sergeant, who in the 1830s had kept the King’s Head in Ardleigh, so was presumably a friend of John Tayler’s.

John died aged sixty-seven, at his residence, Land Lane, East Hill, Colchester, on 2 March 1862, according to a death notice in the Essex Standard (his wife Sarah’s bible has the date wrongly as 2 March 1861, which might support the theory that they were estranged). At the time of his death John owned property ‘within a few yards of the best part of the principal street at Dedham’. Dedham remained his spiritual, if not physical, home and so he was buried at St Mary’s Dedham. His double memorial stone also commemorates his infant son John Mason Tayler, who had died in 1821 aged just one, but clearly hadn’t been forgotten.

John’s funeral would surely have been attended by his eldest daughter (my great-great grandmother) Sarah, her husband the Ardleigh veterinary surgeon Edward Simson and their children, including my great grandmother Polly, aged just sixteen. In 1862, Polly and Frank Roberts were still fifteen years away from marrying (Frank was only fourteen). But were Frank’s parents, the Dedham architect James Mackenzie Roberts (another of my great-great grandfathers) and his wife Phoebe, also present at the funeral? James Mackenzie’s major restoration of St Mary’s was underway: the church would reopen at the end of the year. But more pertinently there was already a family connection –Phoebe was John Tayler’s niece, being the daughter of James Mason, John’s brother-in-law.