Mary Blood was likely born in Vermont, the third child and only daughter of Reuben and Sally Blood, and was raised in Sterling, Massachusetts. She married the Reverend Charles W. Mellen in 1840 and eventually the couple moved Foxborough, Massachusetts, where he served as minister of the Universalist Church. During their twenty-six year marriage, the Mellens resided in upstate New York, as well as Dorchester and Taunton, Massachusetts, and while the exact year the Mellens first visited Gloucester is unknown, scholars have suggested that Mary Mellen could have begun working with Fitz Henry Lane by the late 1840s. Certainly they must have established their teacher-student relationship by 1855, when Mellen’s brother-in-law, the Reverend William R. G. Mellen, was asked to lead Gloucester’s Universalist Church, and in 1859 it is known that Lane visited the Mellen family homestead in Sterling.