The third child and second daughter of Matthew Dix and Martha Thornton was named after her mother.
Martha was probably christened about 1806 in one of two churches that, oddly, stood right next to each other in the village of Antingham - St. Margaret’s, which fell into ruin in the late 1900s, and St. Mary’s, which still stands. Martha appears on the first English census in 1841, and one senses immediately a life of hardship. She was by then about 35 (although the unreliable census in 1841 says she is 30), and she is living in the Sheringham workhouse, in a coastal village a few miles northwest of her birthplace. She is listed, of course, as a pauper, and her 7-year-old son, Daniel, is with her. He is Daniel Dix - an illegitimate child - and Martha’s aging father is in the same workhouse. The definition of a pauper was, historically, a person who had to depend on government relief or public charity for survival, and the workhouse was the only option for many.
Some time in the next few years, Martha’s fortunes lifted. In 1848 she married a 52-year-old labourer, William Puley, in the village of Bradfield, just a mile or so to the east of where she was born. It would have been the first time that 14-year-old Daniel had a father in the home. There is no proof, but it’s even possible that William Puley was the natural father. A common occurrence in those times was for a man to father a child, but only later to marry the mother.
The little family evidently lived in Bradfield, because both bride and groom gave the village as their place of residence for their marriage certificate. Sadly, however, the marriage was to be short-lived. William died some time in the first three or four years after they married. The cause is yet to be discovered, but there is a William Pooley in the death registers who died in Norwich in 1850 who may be the same person. Certainly, by the time of the census in the spring of 1851, Martha is a widow, and Daniel, now 17, is working as an agricultural labourer. His wages would have been enough to support his mother along with what she could earn herself- she never returned to the workhouse.
Some time before 1861, Daniel joined the Army. His mother by then had moved to North Walsham, and lived on her own in Back Street, earning her living as a charwoman, or house cleaner. In the 1871 census, Martha gave her age as 67 and described herself as a “former servant.” She died in 1878 at the age of 74.
Daniel’s life in the army was fairly successful and varied (see below). He is listed as a sergeant on the 1871 census of the barracks at Stoke Damerel, Devon, when he was just 27. He traveled a good deal with the 61st Foot Regiment. He married a very young Irish girl, Jane, and their four daughters were born in Bermuda, West Indies (Alice), Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada (Edith and Gertrude) and Wilton, Somerset, England (Lila).
Sadly, Daniel died when only 46, two years after the death of his mother, leaving his widow, Jane, to raise four daughters. Jane remarried a little over a year after Daniel’s death to another soldier who, like her, was from Ireland. He was Joseph Patrick McCaffrey, who died before the 1891 census which shows Jane once again as a widow.