Author: Young, Hannah
Biography:
YOUNG, Hannah (1776-1856: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born on 2 Dec. 1776 at Milverton, Somerset, to Quaker parents, Thomas Young (1746-1819), a mercer, and his wife Sarah Davis (1752-1811), who had married in 1772. Nothing is known of her education but her elder brother Thomas Young (1773-1829) was a very competent classicist at fourteen and later a distinguished opthamologist and Egyptologist, so the educational environment would have been lively. Her mother may have been the author of two Quaker memorial accounts of the life of Rebecca Scudamore published in Bristol in 1790 and an aunt was the author of the posthumously-published Quaker testimonial, The Christian Experience of Elizabeth Young (1843). However, Hannah Young appears to have left the Quakers and was rebaptised in the Church of England on 6 Sept. 1801 at Swindon, Gloucestershire. In 1818 when she published An Elegy, she was possibly still in Milverton, but after the death of her father the following year, she may have moved to live with a brother. In 1841 she is recorded in the house of her younger brother William, a corn dealer, in North Street, St. Mary Magdalen, Taunton, Somerset, alongside her unmarried sister Ann. After her brother’s death in 1848, she continued to live at that address with her sister and her niece, Mary Young (William’s daughter), and in the 1851 Census she was recorded as a proprietor of houses. She died there in Jan. 1856, aged 79. Her sister died there in 1859. (ancestry.co.uk 7 Sept. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 7 Sept. 2022; Friends’ Books 2: 975-8; “Young, Thomas,” ODNB 7 Sept. 2022; Salisbury and Winchester Journal 10 June 1848; Bristol Mercury 5 Jan. 1856) AA