Sidney Alfred Parsons and his Ancestors

Mary Slade née Diaper (born 1791)

Mary Diaper was Sidney Parsons’ mother’s maternal grandmother. Her grandaughter Harriett Boyes married the Southampton publican John Parsons who was Sidney’s father.

Mary came from Hamble, in Hampshire, on the south coast of England. She was baptised there on the 23rd of January 1791, a daughter of Thomas Diaper and his wife Catherine. Her parents had moved to Hamble from Portsmouth a few years after they married and Thomas became the inn-keeper at the Bull’s Head.


Mary was the sixth of eight children. The eldest, Elizabeth, was born in 1781 while her parents were still living in Portsmouth.

One of the children, William Vaughan, died within a few weeks of being born in January 1784.

Mary’s father Thomas Diaper was descended from one of the Diaper families from the village of Itchen Ferry and who were almost all seafarers, fishermen, shipwrights or boatmen. Itchen Ferry was just across the River Itchen from the old centre of Southampton and was about five miles from Hamble. The village was destroyed by bombing during World War II. Hamble was itself a maritime village (Lord Nelson’s flagship at the battle of Copenhagen, the Elephant, had been built there in 1786). Thomas maintained his links with the sea. He kept a fishing vessel, and some of Mary’s brothers became mariners.

Thomas died in 1796 when Mary was only about five years old.

Although Itchen Ferry was a notoriously insular community, by the latter part of the Napoleonic wars there were substantial numbers of Diapers living around Portsmouth Harbour, eight or nine miles to the south east of Hamble. During the wars there had been a large increase in the strength of the Royal Navy. On the west shore of the harbour the Royal Clarence Yard had been established in 1783 on the site of an old brewery and grew rapidly to become the Royal Navy’s main victualling depot. The Royal Naval Hospital Haslar, the largest brick building in England, was nearby, and on the opposite shore of the harbour the Royal Naval Dockyard in Portsmouth had seen major expansion during the wars. There would have been many employment opportunities for people with good maritime experience so it is not surprising to find that a number of Diapers were living in that area by the end of the first decade of the 19th century.


The red “H” on the map shows Hamble, “C” marks the Royal Clarence Yard in Gosport, and “A” marks Alverstoke, where the Royal Naval Hospital Haslar was located.

Mary Diaper had a sister called Rosetta who was two years younger than her and the two of them moved to Alverstoke, near the eastern side of Portsmouth Harbour, to live and work. They both married there. On the 5th of July 1812 Mary married John Slade, a young shipwright whose wife had died three years before. John had been born in Millbrook on the far side of Southampton. Three years later Rosetta married a man called John Grace who, like the two Diaper sisters, had come from Hamble where his father was a baker. The two Johns became firm friends and John Grace eventually became the executor of John Slade’s will, and also of John Slade’s father’s will, James Slade of Millbrook.

The two couples soon moved back to Hamble. John Slade worked there as a shipwright and John Grace as a baker. The Slades soon moved again, this time to Southampton where John continued to work as a shipwright. John Grace stayed in Hamble and took up the licensed trade. His pub, the Victory Inn, is still thriving. When John Slade’s father died he decided to take up the licensed trade as well. He used his inheritance to buy his local pub, the Swan Inn, at Cross House in Southampton, close to the landing point of the Itchen ferry boats.

In the late 1820s, Mary and John Slade moved again, this time to Bishopstoke, a few miles north of Southampton, where John kept the Anchor Inn. But John died in May 1832, leaving Mary to run the inn with the help of their son John. She was there until at least 1841. After then her whereabouts are uncertain except that on the 30th of March 1851 (the census date) she and her grandchildren Thomas Noble and Elizabeth Hawkins were visiting her son-in-law William Pitt in his pub in Southampton.



Mary Slade and her husband John had eight children — Caroline, Mary Ann, Harriet, John, Elizabeth, Sarah, William and Emily.

Their daughter Harriet was a grandmother of Sidney Parsons and a great-great-grandmother of the present author.

Some information about their children can be found by following this link: John & Mary Slade’s children.



Return to Sidney Parsons’ Ancestors



You are free to make use of the information in these web pages in any way that you wish but please be aware that the author, Mike Parsons, is unable to accept respsonsibility for any errors or omissions.

Mike can be contacted at parsonspublic@gmail.com

The information in these web pages comes from a number of sources including: Hampshire County Records Office, Somerset Heritage Centre; Dorset County Records Office; Southampton City Archives; the General Register Office; several on-line newspaper archives; several on-line transcriptions of Parish Register Entries; and several on-line indexes of births, marriages and deaths. The research has also been guided at times by the published work of others, both on-line and in the form of printed books, and by information from personal correspondence with other researchers, for all of which thanks are given. However, all of the information in these web pages has been independently verified by the author from original sources, facimile copies, or, in the case of a few parish register entries, transcriptions published by on-line genealogy sites. The author is aware that some other researchers have in some cases drawn different conclusions and have published information which is at variance from that shown in these web pages.