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Mrs Mary Ann Hannah BURROWS, née Smith (1820–1854)
St Giles section: Row 21, Grave F36

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This grave is actually a vault which has a headstone and footstone. The footstone (inscribed M. A. H. B.) and the roof of the vault are show below.

Mary Ann Hannah Smith (later Mrs Burrows) was born in Wolvercote in 1820 and baptised there on 21 May as Marianne Hannah Smith. She was the daughter of the millwright John Smith and his wife Elizabeth (born Kidlington in c.1786). Her seven siblings were also baptised at Wolvercote: Thomas (1811), John (1813), Ellia (1814), Joe (1816), Augustus (1818), Elizabeth Jane (1823), and Edwin (1828).

Mary Ann Hannah Smith was living in Stoke Newington when on 10 May 1842 at St Mary’s Church there she married John William Burrows, a confectioner of Hounsditch. He was born on 24 September 1816 into a nonconformist family, the son on John William Burrows the elder and his wife Mary Ann, and was apprenticed to his father who was also a confectioner for seven year from 6 October 1830. In 1841 he was a confectioner at 127 Hounsditch in London.

Mary worked as a confectioner with her husband, but soon after their marriage, in April 1843, John Burrows and Mary Ann Burrows, confectioners, of Hounsditch, were declared bankrupt.

They appear to have had only one one child, born more than four years after their wedding:

• Mary Ann Burrows (born in the St Pancras district of London in 1846/7).

Mrs Burrows left her husband soon after her daughter’s birth and went back to live with her mother, who was now widowed and living in Oxford. The reason why she left him is apparent from the 1851 census, which lists John William Burrows (34) as a patient at Warburton’s Licensed Madhouse in Hackney (the enumerator having accidentally spelt his name out in full, instead of just putting initials).

In 1851 Mrs Mary Ann Hannah Burrows (30), described as a confectioner, and her daughter Mary Ann (4) were living at St Bernard’s Road in Oxford with her mother Mrs Elizabeth Smith (64), who described herself as a millwright’s widow, and her youngest brother Edwin Smith (20), who was of no occupation. The family had an 11-year-old servant girl, who may have looked after Mary Burrows’s daughter while she went out to work.

Mary Ann Hannah Burrows moved to Observatory Street soon after that census and died there in 1854, when her daughter was only seven:

† Mrs Mary Ann Hannah Burrows née Smith died at Observatory Street at the age of 34 on 19 April 1854 and was buried at St Sepulchre’s Cemetery on 22 April (burial recorded in the parish register of St Giles’s Church).

Her mother was probably buried with her father back at Wolvercote, but the names John Smith and Elizabeth Smith were then so common it is hard to identify them.

Her husband John William Burrows died in Hackney, probably at the “madhouse”, at the age of 53 near the beginning of 1870; but their daughter Mary Ann Burrows is hard to trace after 1851.