Anning was born in Lyme Regis
in Dorset, England. Her father, Richard, was a cabinetmaker who
supplemented his income by mining the coastal cliff-side fossil beds
near the town, and selling his finds to tourists. He married Mary Moore,
known as Molly, on 8 August 1793 in Blandford Forum.
The couple moved to Lyme and lived in a house built on the town's
bridge. They attended the Dissenter chapel on Coombe Street, whose
worshippers initially called themselves independents and later, became
known as Congregationalists. Shelley Emling
writes that the family lived so close to the sea that the same storms
that swept along the cliffs to reveal the fossils sometimes flooded the
Annings' home, on one occasion forcing them to crawl out of an upstairs
bedroom window to avoid being drowned.
Richard and Molly had ten children.
The first child, Mary, was born in 1794. She was followed by another
girl, who died almost at once; Joseph in 1796; and another son in 1798,
who died in infancy. In December that year, the oldest child, then four
years old, died after her clothes caught fire, possibly while adding
wood shavings to the fire. The incident was reported in the Bath Chronicle
on 27 December 1798: "A child, four years of age of Mr. R. Anning, a
cabinetmaker of Lyme, was left by the mother for about five minutes ...
in a room where there were some shavings ... The girl's clothes caught
fire and she was so dreadfully burnt as to cause her death."
When another daughter was born just five months later, she was named
Mary after her dead sister. More children were born after her, but none
of them survived more than a couple of years. Only Mary and Joseph
survived to adulthood.
The high childhood mortality rate for the Anning family was not very
unusual. Almost half the children born in Britain throughout the 19th
century died before the age of 5, and in the crowded living conditions
of early 19th century Lyme Regis, infant deaths from diseases like small pox and measles were particularly common.
On 19 August 1800, when Anning was 15 months old, an event occurred
that became part of local lore. She was being held by a neighbour,
Elizabeth Haskings, who was standing with two other women under an elm
tree watching an equestrian show being put on by a travelling company of
horsemen when lightning struck the tree killing all three women below.
Onlookers rushed the infant home where she was revived in a bath of hot
water.
A local doctor declared her survival miraculous. Her family said she
had been a sickly baby before the event but afterwards she seemed to
blossom. For years afterward members of her community would attribute
the child's curiosity, intelligence and lively personality to the
incident.
Her education was extremely limited. She was able to attend a
Congregationalist Sunday school where she learned to read and write.
Congregationalist doctrine, unlike that of the Church of England at the
time, emphasised the importance of education for the poor. Her prized
possession was a bound volume of the Dissenters' Theological Magazine and Review,
in which the family's pastor, the Reverend James Wheaton, had published
two essays, one insisting that God had created the world in six days,
the other urging dissenters to study the new science of geology.
SUMBER : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Anning
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