Mary Ann[e] Tayler was born 23 June 1827 at Elmstead Market (according to the census), the daughter of John and Sarah Tayler.

In 1851 the Tayler family home seemed to be Grinstead Road, Colchester, where her mother (if not her father) lived. However Mary Ann was with her brother Rowland at an address in the High Street, Colchester, as a ‘companion’ to the head of the household, a forty-year-old veterinary surgeon, William Cross, and his wife.

Ten years on, when the 1861 census was taken, she was visiting Robert Mason, a farmer of some standing of Hall Farm, Brightlingsea. He was probably her uncle, as her mother was a Mason before she married.

Another decade on and the peripatetic Mary Ann was with her brother Henry at North Hill, Colchester, when the 1871 census was taken. She was still unmarried, her age wrongly given as thirty-nine. Henry died six years later. According to a list of burials in Colchester cemetery in the Essex Standard, Mary Ann seems to have died in June 1890, aged sixty-four, when she was living in the Colchester parish of St Giles.