Margaret Ann Taylor, called Annie, grew up in Weymouth, Nova Scotia, and came to Boston as a young woman. There she married the chronometer maker William J. Hiatt. Their son Frederick Hiatt was the father of Edith Hiatt. Margaret lived to be ninety.
A Taylor of Weymouth
Margaret's father was Morris Leonard Taylor. A family history says he was born on his father's plantation on the Sissiboo River at Weymouth, in what is now Digby County, Nova Scotia, and he was baptized at Trinity Anglican Church in Digby on August 10, 1801. Weymouth was founded in 1783 by Loyalists, Americans who had sided with the king in the Revolution and left the new United States when the war was lost. By the middle of the 1800s it was a busy little place of shipping and shipbuilding, near where the Sissiboo River runs into St. Mary's Bay.
Morris married Mary Alice Lee at Digby on November 20, 1828. Mary Alice was born in 1805, the daughter of Benjamin Lee and Eliphal "Fally" Harding. Margaret was one of at least eight children:
- Charles Sloggart, born 1832, who married Margaret Mantell and died in 1904 at Saint John, New Brunswick
- Margaret Ann, born 1833
- Emily
- John S., born about 1841, who died in Boston on May 6, 1873, at 32
- Edward R., born January 29, 1843, who married Blanch B. Field in New York City in 1882 and died in Brooklyn in 1913
- George C., who died in July 1911
- Henry Morris
- Alice
Like Margaret, several of her brothers left Nova Scotia. John died in Boston, Edward settled in New York, and Charles lived across the Bay of Fundy in Saint John, New Brunswick. Margaret's father died on December 22, 1877, and her mother on March 12, 1890, at about 85. They are both buried in Hillcrest Cemetery at Little River, in Digby County.
Boston
Margaret married William J. Hiatt in Boston on February 6, 1862. William had come from London in 1859 and was a watchmaker, like his father and his brother Richard. The marriage record gives Margaret's father as Leonard and her mother as Mary, and says the bride was born in 1839 at St. John, New Brunswick. When she died, her death record said she had been in the United States for 62 years, which also points to about 1862.
In November 1862, the year they married, William's brother Richard drowned when his train ran off an open drawbridge between Charlestown and Boston. Their son Frederick William was born in October 1863 in Somerville. A second son was born on August 25, 1872, at 66 Appleton Street in Boston, and named Winfield.
William worked as a chronometer maker for William Bond & Son on State Street for more than twenty years. The family moved often, from Somerville to rooms and hotels in Boston's South End, among them Appleton Street, Chandler Street and the Hotel Clifton on Columbus Avenue. In 1888 William opened a candy store at 1609 Washington Street, and young Winfield ran it. In 1889, at seventeen, Winfield was sent to the house of correction for his part in a burglary. He later became an actor. You can read more on William's page.
When and where was Margaret born?
Margaret's age and birthplace change from record to record:
- Her marriage record, 1862: born 1839, St. John, New Brunswick
- 1870 census: the wife is called Emma, 26, born about 1844 in New Brunswick
- 1880 census: the wife is called Mary, 37, born about 1843 in Nova Scotia
- 1900 census: born 1840, English Canada
- 1910 census: born 1841, English Canada
- Her death record, 1924: age 90 years, 10 months, 13 days, born in Weymouth, Nova Scotia
- The Town Crier of Newton Centre, 1924: age 92
Her death record gives no birth date, only her age: 90 years, 10 months and 13 days on February 28, 1924. Counting back, that is April 15, 1833. Her son Frederick gave the information, and an age given exact to the day suggests the family knew her real birth date. By that date Margaret was about 28 when she married, not 23 as her marriage record suggests, and she was about four years older than William, who was born about 1837. For most of her life she gave her age as six to eleven years younger than it was. Many women of her time did the same, and a wife who was older than her husband had a special reason to. The censuses of 1870 and 1880 call her Emma and Mary. Those are probably mistakes by the census taker, or by whoever answered the door, since Frederick is in the household both times.
A Widow at Ninety
William died at their home, 17 Batavia Street in Boston, on March 18, 1920. Margaret was about 86. Late in 1923, at ninety, she moved to 241 Walnut Street in Newtonville. Three months later she fell to the floor there and broke her arm, the radius bone. She was taken to Newton Hospital, and died there on February 28, 1924. The medical examiner, George L. West, gave the cause as "exhaustion following injury to arm. Fracture of radius. Fall to floor." Her son Frederick of 29 High Street, Malden, gave the information for the record.
The Boston Post printed a death notice on March 1. It asked the newspapers of St. John, New Brunswick, to copy it, so the family still had people there who would want to know.
HIATT—In Newton, Feb. 28, Margaret A., widow of the late William J. Hiatt. Relatives and friends are invited to attend the services at the parlors of W. H. Graham, 1770 Washington st., Boston, Sunday, March 2, at 2:30 p.m. (St. John, N.B., papers please copy.)
The Town Crier of Newton Centre also noted her death a week later.
HIATT—Feb. 28, Margaret A. Hiatt, 241 Walnut st, ward 5, age 92y. Interment in Mt. Hope Cemetery, Boston.
After the service at W. H. Graham's on Sunday, March 2, 1924, the same undertaker who had buried William four years before, Margaret was buried beside her husband in Mount Hope Cemetery in Boston. Her son Winfield was buried there too, in 1932.
