[2] In 1822, they moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where her father opened a saloon and livery stable and her brother, George Boyer Vashon, was born two years later, in 1824.
[3] Because Pittsburgh did not provide public education for black children at the time, her father began a school, the Pittsburgh African Education, in the basement of an African Methodist Episcopal church, where Mary Frances may have received some of her early schooling alongside her brother George and Martin Delaney.
[5][6] She was sent to Philadelphia to study at the private school, Female Academy of Miss Sarah Mapps Douglass, and went on to take out ads in Martin Delaney's newspaper, The Mystery, advertising raised embroidery lessons.
[2] An avid abolitionist, Mary Frances Vashon took her knowledge into the field of journalism, writing for anti-slavery newspapers, including William Howard Day's The Alienated American[2] and Frederick Douglass's "Frederick Douglass' Paper",[7] under the name of "Fanny Homewood", "Fanny" being the name of her maternal grandmother.
In September 1854, Mary, age 36, and her mother, Anne, followed him in death as a cholera epidemic swept through Pittsburgh.