Finding Alice Pummeroy

Over the last few weeks I have finally made progress on a family history mystery that has been annoying and frustrating me for many years - the fate of my great aunt Alice May Pummeroy.

According to the Victorian Birth Index, Alice May Pummeroy was born in Carlton in 1897 to Alfred Henry Pummeroy and Eliza (Beseler).  Alice was only 3 years old when her father died of pneumonia, leaving his widow destitute with 4 young children -  Edith Margaret (who was a deaf-mute) 4, Alice May 3, Alfred Edward 2 and William Henry 4 months.  Eliza took in washing to support her family, and the local ladies benevolent society gave her 3 shillings a week in assistance.

On 8 March 1901, newspapers I located on Trove report Eliza making an appeal to the courts for help.  When asked if she wished to surrender her children to the state she refused, wanting to keep them at home.  The court described the children as clean and neatly kept, and committed the children to the Department with the recommendation they be handed over to their mother.  Eliza was granted 10 shillings from the poor box.

Eliza struggled on before surrendering her two boys to the orphanage, but kept her girls with her, and in 1911 remarried to Edward Jennion, with whom she had two more boys, Edwin and Daniel.   All the other siblings can be traced through electoral rolls and other records, but Alice disappears, and for several years I searched for her in vain.

Then came the breakthrough.  In New Zealand, I found a record for a May Alice Pummeroy marrying David James Moorhead in 1918.  Looking in New Zealand for May Moorhead, I located several electoral roll listings before she disappeared again, reappearing in Australia as May Alice Moorhead in electoral rolls from 1950 to 1980.  David James Moorhead is recorded as dying in Victoria in 1951, age 77.  His death certificate lists him as being born in Christchurch, New Zealand.

I have not located a death certificate for Alice May yet, but according to the electoral rolls she was still alive in 1980.  There is no death notice in the Ryerson Index or in the Victorian Death Index, nor can I find a will with the PROV.  I'll just have to keep looking, but at least I have her marriage, and I know she was known by her middle name.