Frances seems to have had an unlucky life. Brought up in what may be imagined as the luxury of Cadbury Court, she married her first cousin Francis Newman, eldest son of her father's younger brother Henry. She can have been only 19 or 20 at the time, and he just 18 or 19, because their first child was born in May 1779. If Cliff Ranson's information is correct, they had to get married since he dates the wedding as taking place in 1779. At any rate, the marriage seems to have been an unhappy one.

Having suffered the loss of her first child in 1779, Frances suffered a second loss in 1780 when her second child, a son, was stillborn. In May 1784 to a daughter who named Frances Charlotte after her mother. By then (according to the Newman-Rogers' Bible) the cousins were living at Furston House in the village of Cadbury, Devon (not to be confused with the villages of North and South Cadbury in nearby Somerset!)

By this time, her husband Francis was getting into debt with the result that in 1783 the couple appears to have jointly mortgaged land that had been given over to them by Frances's father, in order to pay Francis's debts. sBy 1786 he and Frances were in legal dispute against one another over payment of a £100 per year annuity that he was supposed to make over to her (see Chancery Court: ref C12/629/31).

According to these same Chancery records, Francis and Frances became estranged around May 1784 when Francis moved to France to live with another lady by the name of Lydia Ferguson. He remained separated from her until October 1975 when he returned to England until early the following year. Around this time, Frances became pregnant again, giving birth to her fourth child, a daughter in November 1785. The baby survived just one year, being buried in North Cadbury in May 1786, shortly after which, in August 1786, Lydia Ferguson presented Francis with a son.

Meanwhile, or shortly afterwards, it appears that Francis mortgaged his inheritance to pay his debts. Through 1791 and 1792 arguments were heard in the Chancery Court between Francis and his brother-in-law James Rogers. Whatever the outcome, in 1796, the remaining Newman estates were sold, and Frances and her father moved to a cottage in Piddeltrenthide in Dorset where Frances lived for the rest of her life.

Presumably Frances's only surviving child Frances Charlotte did not produce off-spring, or at least she had no sons, since Frances left an important family heir-loom - the Newman-Rogers' Bible - to her nephew, Francis Newman-Rogers. The same deduction may be drawn from Louise Annie Rogers' statement that Frances's father Francis Newman had bequested (or requested) that the Newman name be adopted by the Rogers family. Perhaps the more junior Newman branch (descending from Frances's uncle Henry) was not considered worthy since this was the branch that Frances's husband Francis had been part of!