Miss Rimington
(1838-1879)
29 April 1861
Volume 3, page 159, sitting number 3325.
[The sitter is identified only as ‘Miss Rimington’ in the Silvy daybooks. However, on Ancestry’s website a genealogist has posted a different photograph of Maria Rimington, daughter of James Rimington, and she is clearly the same person. ]
Miss Maria Rimington was the third daughter of James Rimington (1787-1839) of Broomhead Hall in West Yorkshire, a barrister-at-law and later a Justice of the Peace and Bankruptcy Commissioner.
In the 19th century it was the convention that only the eldest unmarried girl in a family was entitled to style herself ‘Miss + only her surname.’ Other girls in the family had to style themselves ‘Miss + forename or initial + surname.’ As her elder sisters married, each successive daughter was entitled to assume the privilege of styling herself as ‘Miss + only her surname.’
Although the Miss Rimington seen here was the third daughter in the Rimington household, her elder sister Harriet Rimington had married in 1848 and the next girl in the family Lucy Anne Rimington had married in 1860, so when this young woman sat for Silvy on 29 April 1861, she was the last unmarried girl in the family and would therefore have styled herself ‘Miss Rimington.’
Born on 4 July 1838 Maria Rimington was the daughter of James Rimington and his wife Sarah née Ward, daughter of Samuel Broomhead Ward. Although James entered the matrimonial state relatively late in life (he was 40 at the time of his marriage), he sired six children before his death in 1839 at the age of 52. Maria, his last child, was born the year before his death.
When the census was taken in 1861 Maria was living at Rockbeare House (presumably today’s Rockbeare Manor) in Devon. The head of the household was her widowed mother Sarah Rimington. The household included Maria’s brother John Wilson Rimington, and her married sister Lucy Anne Hodge, together with Lucy's husband Colonel Edward Cooper Hodge. The household also included a housekeeper, a butler and five other live-in servants with more living in buildings on the estate.
On 1 August 1861 Maria married Edward Salvin Bowlby [who had sat for Silvy on 24 April 1861], eldest son of the Reverend Edward Bowlby.
The family appear on the 1871 census living at 1, West Street in Ryde, on the the Isle of Wight. Edward described himself as a ‘Barrister-at-Law, practising.’ The household included their two young sons and five servants, one of whom was a footman and another a nurse.
Mrs Maria Bowlby died, aged 39, on 6 January 1879 at Busbridge Lodge, Ryde, on the Isle of Wight. The cause of death was recorded as ‘Chronic Hepatitis, Albuminuria, Convulsions.’