Margaret Sarah Firmstone
Margaret Sarah Firmstone was one of the thirteen children born to William Charles Firmstone and his wife Frances nee Reade between 1847 and 1871. She was the fifth child, born in the parish of Hagley, Worcestershire, on 11 November 1854. William Charles was a corn merchant; he died in 1873 and his wife died in 1874; thus the last-born children of the family were left without parents at a very young age and several grew up in the households of their older siblings. Margaret herself was 19 when both her parents died.
The Firmstone dynasty was highly clerical: all of Margaret's three older brothers went into the church and some of her sisters married clergymen too. Their father William was the youngest of the eleven children of William Firmstone and Sarah nee Onions, and his oldest sibling Frances Anne married the Reverend John Baxter. This relationship explains the presence of Margaret Sarah Firmstone in Stoneleigh: Frances Baxter's daughter Emily married Canon John Thorn, vicar of Stoneleigh for 33 years. Thus Margaret Sarah Firmstone was a cousin of
Emily Thorn nee Baxter.
Emily died in 1879 and is buried at
D 26.24.
In the 1881 Stoneleigh census, visiting the widowed Canon Thorn are Margaret's sisters Alice, Maude, Lucy and Emily Firmstone. The oldest of these girls was 20 and the youngest 10. It is tempting to speculate that they had been "visiting" for some time, as Margaret had died, aged 26, at the Stoneleigh vicarage just a few months before, on 7 December 1880. She had been buried at Stoneleigh on 9 December. Perhaps she and her sisters were regular guests of Canon Thorn after the death of his wife, their cousin? Certainly at least one of them was in Stoneleigh in January 1883, a guest at the vicarage.
It is possible that Margaret had been in Stoneleigh caring for Emily Thorn before she died. The lives of Margaret Sarah Firmstone and her unmarried sisters certainly reveal the plight of the orphaned spinster at that time, continually visiting other relatives. It seems that Margaret, too, had found a home in Stoneleigh after the death of her parents.