Associated events
Displaying 71 - 80 of 80
Cause of death - marasmus
Marasmus was a severe form of malnutrition – the baby would have looked extremely emaciated, probably a result of her mother, 18-year-old Fanny, not being able to feed her.
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.
No father was noted on Ellen's birth certificate. She would note her father's name as William Brown on her marriage certificate, and marry as Ellen Brown.
Ellen Morgan signed the women's suffrage petition. Gabriel and Ellen Morgan were living at Stafford street, Collingwood (rate books) in 1891.
Cause of death - hydatids of the liver, rupture of the liver
Ellen Vontom (Sister Vontom) was a member of the Good Templars, a temperance organisation, and was attending meetings in 1890 at least.
John Vontom drowned in an appalling workplace incident on the Yarra river. His death was widely reported in the newspapers – by The Age under the ballad-like leader of ‘The Wool Washer’s Tragedy’ and the Leader under the more apt ‘Wilful Murder’. John had worked for Nettleton’s wool washing works in Collingwood for 15 years and was at his job with several other men on a landing stage on the Yarra river one Monday afternoon. A fellow worker, the worse for drink and under no provocation, grabbed John unawares from behind (‘taking hold of him in a habit peculiar to roughs’) and threw him into the river, it seemed, for a joke. The perpetrator was sentenced to only three years hard labour for manslaughter (‘the jury commended him to mercy on the ground of his intoxication at the time’), serving barely more than two. Such little value put on a life and the consequences of its loss. Ellen, his wife, would have read all about her husband’s last moments in the newspapers, even while his body was still unrecovered: ‘Vontom disappeared beneath the surface of the dirty stream at once, but rose again a couple of seconds after, some yards away. A life-buoy was thrown to him, but he failed to reach it, and immediately sank, and was not seen any more.’ John’s children ranged in age from four to twelve years old. The poem his wife Ellen inserted in his memory the following year in The Age spoke to a deep and abiding loss.