Samuel Paget was a brewer and ship owner in Great Yarmouth and made a fortune provisioning ships during the Napoleonic wars; however, the family experienced a severe financial crisis in the 1820s and Samuel was forced to sell his house on the quay at Great Yarmouth and his art collection. His wife, Sarah Elizabeth, known as Betsey, was a keen artist, collector, and chronicler of events, and the habit of keeping a family history was passed on, in particular to their son Alfred. Sarah bore seventeen children, of whom nine survived to adulthood. Two of them, George Edward Paget and James Paget, had successful careers in medicine. George Edward Paget, who became Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge University, married Clara Fardell; they had ten children, three of whom died in infancy. Their daughter Clara Maud (known as Maud) married the German-born ornithologist Hans Gadow; they lived in Great Shelford, near Cambridge. George and Clara Paget’s daughter Rose Elizabeth married the physicist Joseph John Thomson, 1856-1940, Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge; they had two children, George Paget Thomson and Joan Thomson (later Charnock). George and Clara Paget’s daughter Violet (known as Vie), Rose’s twin, married, as her second husband, J. H. Batty, a businessman with interests in African mines and trading. George and Clara Paget’s son George Edmund Paget (known as Edmund), became a stockbroker, and married Stella Salomons (d. 1939). Edmund and Stella’s son Arthur Richard Paget married Ichi Watanabe in 1911 and lived in Japan.