Elizabeth Blewett (c.1827/1828-[1894])
Personal details
Gender:
Female
Notes:
Married names —
- Elizabeth Morgan
- Elizabeth Staines
- Elizabeth Pocock
Relationships
Husband:
Children:
Marriage date:
15 July 1849
Notes:
Elizabeth's mother Ruth Blewett was a witness. The other witness was Robert Morgan, neither father nor brother of John Morgan. Was he an uncle?
References:
Husband:
Children:
Marriage date:
about 1865
Marriage place:
Notes:
Elizabeth Morgan claimed on their daughter Fanny's birth certificate to have married William Staines in Collingwood 28 November 1865. No record of this marriage was registered.
Husband:
Marriage date:
24 February 1870
Notes:
Henry Pocock was fifteen years older than Elizabeth and a very recent widower, with a married daughter and fifteen-year-old son; no doubt he wanted another domestic to look after his house and son. Elizabeth still had her children Gabriel, 8½, and Fanny, 2½, to look after. Elizabeth’s use of the surname Morgan at her father’s inquest three months after marrying suggests that the marriage may already have fallen apart in that short space of time.
References:
Family
Father:
Mother:
Baptism
Date:
6 January 1828
References:
England & Wales Census 1841
Date:
6 June 1841
England & Wales Census 1851
Date:
30 March 1851
Emigration
Date:
20 July 1854
Notes:
John Morgan's granddaughter Florence recalled later in life (letter to Joan Wallis), ‘All I heard of my father’s father was that on the journey out from Wales he acted as Schoolmaster on board ship.’ (They left from Liverpool, not Wales.) As time would show, John didn’t seem temperamentally suited to the role. But were there any candidates more likely than John on board the Bloomer who could have acted as schoolmaster? No. More than a third of the emigrants were agricultural labourers from Scotland. The rest were made up of ‘a superior class of mechanics’: carpenters, smiths, bricklayers and a wheelwright, with masons making up the second largest group by profession. A good proportion of the adult passengers could both read and write. (Analysis based on shipping manifest.)
Immigration
Date:
21 November 1854
Notes:
At one hundred and twenty four days at sea, the Bloomer’s voyage was a very long one for the time. Of the eleven ships which arrived in Portland in western Victoria in 1854, it was the slowest. The quickest, the Edward Johnson, arrived a few months before the Bloomer in September 1854, and took only 78 days. John and Elizabeth's infant daughter's birth was registered in the Collingwood/Richmond district on 20 April 1855 by Elizabeth, and states she was born at sea on 24 November 1854 on the Bloomer ‘on her voyage from Liverpool’. Perhaps Elizabeth couldn’t remember the date (the Bloomer had arrived by the 21st).
Possible death
Date:
1 November 1894
Place:
Notes:
Cause of death - senile debility, exhaustion