Maria was born Maria M. Taney in 1766 in the Philadelphia area. Her father was Samuel Taney, whose ancestors belonged to a noble and distinguished Roman Catholic family from County Cork, Ireland. His people emigrated to America in the early 1700s, settled in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and soon became Protestant. Samuel Taney’s family was a branch of the original Taney family, to which Roger Brooke Taney, L.L. D., belonged. Roger Brooke Taney served as the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1836 to 1864.
Maria’s first husband was John Henry Brown, Esq., a socially prominent Philadelphian. They had several children, the last being Henry Stephen Brown (1804-1868), who became a successful mercantile sea captain. In 1801, a miniature (watercolor on ivory) was painted of Maria by the illustrious Philadelphia artist, James Peale (1749-1831). That she had a portrait painted of herself by such a prominent artist reveals John’s and Maria’s high social status and economic level. John died sometime around 1813 or 1814.
Maria M. Taney/Brown Bassett, 1766-1854
Maternal great-great-great-grandmother
Not long after John died, Maria married Samuel Bassett, Jr. (1778-1827), a wealthy sea captain who worked as first mate on several merchant sailing ships, with ports in the British Isles and the Caribbean. Samuel and Maria had only one child, whom they named Maria M. Bassett, born on July 26, 1815. On August 11, 1827, Samuel sailed out of Philadelphia for Havana on the “Brig Hamlet.” Unfortunately, during the voyage he was lost at sea. Five years later, in 1832, their daughter Maria married Ephraim Scudder Green (1810-1868) from Newark, New Jersey. The couple eventually settled in Quincy, Illinois in 1850. They had several children, the last being my great grandfather, Louis Basset Green (1855-1941).
According to the Philadelphia City Directory table, Samuel’s family moved into the “81 Green Street” address around 1825. After her daughter got married in 1832, Maria M. Taney/Brown Bassett became an “empty nester.” According to the directory, she resided in the same address until she died in 1854, occupying the same house, and remaining a widow for almost 30 years.
Even though her last child by Samuel had moved on, she still had half-siblings by her first husband John in the Philadelphia area to visit and find comfort with. We know this fact through a family album which fortunately has survived to this day. Her daughter, now Mrs. Maria M. Bassett Green, was living in Quincy, Illinois, a port city along the Mississippi River, far from her hometown of Philadelphia. One of her activities was to meticulously maintain an album of photographs of her family members. Many of these photographs appear to have been sent to her from her Philadelphia mother, which her mother labelled, for example, “John Brown, my nephew,” “May Brown, my niece,” “Mrs. James Brown, my niece.” Two of these photographs, however, are of her own mother. One of these was taken sometime in the late 1840s or 1850s, before she died in 1854. The other is a line drawing of the watercolor on ivory miniature painted by James Peale that she sat for in 1801.
The photographic album is now in the possession of my second cousin, Joyce François, of Charlotte, Virginia, who is a direct descendant of Maria M. Bassett Green. The watercolor on ivory miniature is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was donated to the Museum by Jane Barbour Charles (1891-1979), a second cousin of my mother, Sally Phipps Harned (1911-1978).
