Author: PYE, Mary
Biography:
PYE, Mary, later JONES (1769-1839: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born 8 Jan. 1769, the daughter of Henry James Pye (q.v.) and his wife Mary Hooke. With her younger sister Caroline Matilda (1775-1861) she took part in musical evenings and home theatricals. Her sister later married Samuel Arnold, the theatrical producer and friend of Charles Lamb (q.v.). Her mother died in 1796 and her father remarried in 1801. She married Lieut. John Jones of the 35th Regiment of Foot in 1805 but he died in the Alexandria Campaign in Egypt on 6 Aug. 1807. Her father died in 1813 and left a house in Queen’s Square and other property in Pinner. Although he made provision for his various children from both marriages, later accounts describe him as “pennyless” at his death. His widow, Martha Corbett, remained in the Pinner house until her death, aged 91, in 1861. In 1820 Mary Pye was brought to the attention of the RLF. Charles Symmons looked into her case again in 1824 and noted that her sister had escaped indigence through marriage but that Mary had married into “a rank below herself” and endured severe poverty. For reasons unknown, their uncle, Walter Pye, had made provision in his will of 1824 for Caroline Matilda but not Mary. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s she lived at various addresses in Pimlico. On 14 July 1838, she made a will leaving her piano and music books to Charles Solomon and requested she be buried next to her mother. She died 18 May 1839, at 31 Lower Ranelagh Road, Pimlico, aged 70. Her death certificate and burial at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, record her as Mary Pye, not Mary Jones. Her previous date of death was thought to be 1834 but this was an error from the GM accounts of her father and various editions of Burke. (findmypast.co.uk 23 Jul. 2020; ancestry.co.uk 23 Jul. 2020; GM Sept. 1813, 293-296; Bath Chronicle 29 Dec. 1796; Saint James’s Chronicle 15 Aug. 1805; RLF 1/411; John Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History [1836] 1:352) AA
Other Names:
- Mary Jones