Mary Ann Wood

Mary Ann Wood was baptised at Holy Trinity, Kingston-upon-Hull, on the 6th of June 1837 — the first Hull-born generation of a Derbyshire family. Her father, Samuel Wood, had come off the land at Darley Dale in Derbyshire and was carting for his living in the town; her mother, Elizabeth Graham, was a Hull woman. Mary Ann grew up among her father's carts in Anne Street, in the parish of St Mary, Sculcoates.

By 1851, at thirteen or fourteen, she was out to service across the old town — a servant at an inn on Dagger Lane. Three years later, on the 5th of June 1854, she married at Holy Trinity: John Henry Frith, a bricklayer from Finkle Street, the son of a Grimsby stonemason. She was a minor — under twenty-one — and where her husband signed the register in a bold, flourishing hand, Mary Ann made her mark. Her elder brother, James Graham Wood, witnessed the wedding.

The couple settled in Anne Street and children came — five in eleven years, Samuel David the second of them, born in 1857. It was a short marriage. On the 20th of July 1866 Mary Ann died at home of phthisis — consumption — not yet thirty, with her husband present at the death. Her children were left motherless, Samuel David a boy of nine; John Henry married again within the year.

What the records show next is the Wood family closing round her children. By 1871 her daughter Ann Elizabeth Frith, twelve, was living with her widowed grandmother Elizabeth Wood in Anne Street; by 1881 another Frith girl, Hannah, was in service to Mary Ann's brother George at the Vauxhall Tavern. Through her son Samuel David — the fruiterer who would lead the Hull dockers — Mary Ann Wood's short life carries the Frith name down to the Brocks.