FATHER

Joseph Stansbury

MOTHER
 
Sarah

HUSBAND

Robert Mott

CHILDREN

1. Edward Mott b. 1798

2. Arthur Mott b. 06 Feb 1799

3. Alfred Mott

4. Jeanette Mott b. 14 Jun 1803

When they first met, Robert's Quaker family was a bit anxious. Lydia was "a charming young lady in the fashionable world. Robert was 23, Miss Lydia Philadelphia Stansbury had reached her eighteenth birthday the previous February. Not only was her family "fashionable" - her father was a soldier; an officer in the British army, and a resolute Tory in the Revolutionary War.
Robert Mott was a most devout spirit, and was always on the most intimate and affectionate terms with his father." (*) He knew that if he married Lydia "he would forfeit his place "in Meeting" a humiliation to Robert as well as to his father. Lydia was accustomed to a piano. Friends never had pianos, and counted music with rioting. But Robert wanted to marry her anyway and his father basically said he should follow his heart.
"Soon after her marriage Lydia sat one morning at her piano when her father-in-law entered the room. In gentlest tones he said, "My dear daughter, dost though find pleasure in such things?" And she began to understand his feeling against music. This, she afterwards said, was the first, of many such talks. She sympathized in her father-in-law's deep religious feelings, and soon began to accept his views. Her fashionable dress and manners were toned down into Quakerism. She soon became a Friend and an accepted minister in the Society of Friends.(*)
They had four children together and then Robert died of consumption after only 10 years of marriage. Lydia then wrote, "A Brief Account of the Life, Last Sickness, and Death, of Robert Mott, son of James and Mary Mott." She also writes of the death of her daughter, Jeannette, seven years later, in 1812. After the book was written, two other sons died in 1816. She was left with only one son, Arthur. She remained very close to James Mott and was possibly his housekeeper for awhile.(*)pg 74  He died in 1823.
 James Mott, was very active in the anti-slavery movement and would use nothing that was made with slave labor either in food or in dress. "For this reason he limited his family to maple sugar, and unless they could get coffee free from the taint of slavery they made it from peas, and he always wore linen in the place of cotton."

(*) Adam and Anne Mott, by Thomas C. Cornell, 1890

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