Mary Greenland was the youngest of the three children of John Greenland (1690-1744) and his wife Jane Batchelor, of Lovelace in the parish of Bethersden in Kent. On 28th April 1748, at the age of nineteen, she married Richard Dawkes (1719-1755), who came from an established family in Dover, Kent. They had five children, but only two daughters survived infancy: Honora (1749-1810) and Mary (1754-1778). Richard Dawkes died in Dover in 1755, leaving Mary as a 26-year-old widow with two young children, and settling on her for life the estate of Maxton in Dover that he had inherited from his father. In April 1776 it was disclosed that Elizabeth Montagu’s brother Charles Robinson had secretly married Mary Dawkes and they had a daughter, Sarah (1759-1839), who was later to marry William Hougham. Mary died in Canterbury at the age of sixty-nine. Mary’s sister Jane Greenland married Morris Montagu in 1757.