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Horatia was the wife of Lieutenant Henry William Mason RN and she lived with her husband and family in Budleigh Salterton from the mid 1840s into the 1860s. 

Admiral Horatio Nelson was born in Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk to the Rev. Edmund Nelson and his wife Catherine (née Suckling).  He was one of eleven children the youngest being his sister Catherine born in 1767, who subsequently married George Matcham.  George and Catherine had fourteen children and their daughter Horatia was born in Bath in 1801; in 1826 Horatia Matcham married Henry William Mason in Whiteparish, Wiltshire (1). 

Henry Mason was a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy.  He had been born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, in about 1793 and joined the Navy in November 1806 at a very young age.  He passed his exams for Lieutenant in 1815.  As the French fleet was very ineffective after 1805 he appears to have had quite a quiet time in the Service and he returned to Buckinghamshire (whether before or after his marriage is unclear).  

He must have been involved to some extent in local politics or administration because he was for a year High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire as evidenced by the following: 

“In the early 1800s the niece of Lord Nelson resided in Beel House with her husband Lt. Henry William Mason, High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire” (2, 3).  

He was living in Beel House in 1829 and was the High Sheriff for that year (4).  He was still paying the Land Tax for Beel House until at least 1836 but, as evidenced by the birth places of his children, the family was in Kent at Ramsgate 1833-5 and at Eastry in 1839.  

By 1841 they were living at Wish House in Eastbourne and they first appear in the Budleigh Salterton Directories on West Hill in 1845 and then in Little Knowle in 1847.  The family was still in Little Knowle in 1851 and at that time it consisted of six unmarried daughters aged from 12 to 26 plus a 23-year old son George Nelson Pomeroy Mason. 

George was a Midshipman on furlough from the East India Company navy which he joined in 1842 (5), and where he later became a Commander; he subsequently married Marian Rouse in Topsham in September 1872 after his first wife, Amelia Jane D'istere Guinness, died the same year.  

Henry and Horatia also had a younger son called Reuben, born in 1839, but he must have been away from home in 1851. 

Henry Mason was on half-pay from the navy in 1841 and 1851.  He died in 1859 (6) and Horatia continued to live in Budleigh, appearing in the 1861 census, but she died in 1870 in Bedminster, near Bristol (6).  Horatio Nelson’s widow had moved to Exmouth in 1816; she died in 1831 so Horatia must have visited her aunt (if she ever did) before Horatia and her family moved to Budleigh.  

Compiled and Researched by Roger Lendon, © 2011 

(1) http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~haslatter/history/bowdens/bk/f1726

(2) www.bucksfhs.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=128&Itemid=182

(3) http://www.localauthoritypublishing.co.uk/councils/amersham/around.html

(4) London Gazette Issue 18549 February 1829

(5) Indian Navy List from the East India Register, 1850

(6) www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/search.pl  

133   BS-B-00049  Biography any