Thanks, Kite! I note that with small children clustering about her, she is still calling herself a spinster.
It's difficult to be sure, but it looks as if Mary Ann was deaf from birth, was in the workhouse, and died there in 1853. The death gives the age of a Mary Shawle aged 19, and the 1851 shows her as aged 22, born London, but it's possible if she were in and out of the workhouse, they might have misheard her details.
I'm still struggling to work out how a young widow with a small child got herself from Norfolk to Staffordshire some time between 1828 and 1833.
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The chestnuts cast their flambeaux
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