#52Ancestors - Week 2 - Favourite Find

The topic for Week 2 of 52 Ancestors is 'Favourite Find', and how do I choose just one?  My first response is 'The one I made most recently!'  The latest bright shiny fact or detail or record that I have located to add to my family history.  Then I make a newer find, and quickly my focus shifts to finding all I can about this new event or detail, fleshing out the story behind it and digging deeper if I can.

I suppose my overall favourite finds would have to be those which came as a surprise, things I discovered when looking for something else or an event that turned out to have a much bigger story behind it.

One such would be the desperate story of my great grandmother Eliza Pummeroy (nee Beseler).  Eliza was born in 1871 in Learmonth, Victoria to Edward Beseler and Emma (nee Flower).  Eliza married Alfred Pummeroy in1895 in St Kilda, where Alfred worked as a plasterer.  They had four children before Alfred suddenly became ill with pneumonia and died on 6 Feb 1901, leaving Eliza with 4 young children and in a desperate situation.

The family lived in rented housing and had little by way of savings.  With four children to look after, the eldest 4 years old and deaf and mute, the youngest (my grandfather William) only 2 months old, Eliza was unable to do much by way of paid work.  She took in washing to make a little money, and was given 3 shillings a week by the local Ladies Benevolent Society to support herself and her four young children.  It wasn't enough.

After struggling for a month after her husband's sudden death, Eliza took the step of applying to the local court for help, risking having her children removed from her custody and placed in an orphanage, something she was adamant she did not want.  The judges hearing the case awarded her 10 shillings from the poor box and committed the children to the department, with the recommendation they be handed back to their mother.

I learned all this from reports in the newspapers about her desperate plea to the courts.  And what had I been looking for when I found these articles?  I was looking for a death notice for my great grandfather.  The articles I found came as a total surprise - all I knew before then was that my great-grandfather had died suddenly when Grandad was just a baby and that grandad had spent time in an orphanage until his mother remarried and was able to reclaim him.  That was all my mother knew - my grandfather had died several years before I was born and my grandmother knew little more.