Hello Ellen, or were you called Nellie? I am sorry I never got to meet you, but as you died over 100 years ago, I thought I’d update you on what we know about you. I am married to your great-grandson Ian and he has spent a great deal of his life on family research, particularly on yourself. This has taken Ian to Ireland, Adelaide and both of us have spent many hours writing to any organisation who may have had any information about you. Just as we were at the point of thinking there were no avenues left, Ian attended a funeral and met your daughter Ellen’s grandson George, and George had a photo of you. We are absolutely thrilled. Do you remember when this was taken?

You are the matriarch of the Delahoys in Australia and many of those who live here now descend from William and yourself. Until this generation, boys predominated and most of your descendants had more sons than daughters.

Ellen, family research is a big thing now and we have things you could not have dreamed of, among them something called a computer which enables us to find information by sitting in our homes looking at a screen. In this way we can contact anybody in the world in a matter of seconds and bring up pictures of anywhere. When you came to Australia on the “Elgin” your journey took 3.5 months and we can only imagine the conditions on the ship with 195 orphaned girls, as well as other passengers! A person can fly from Melbourne to Ireland in less than 24 hours in something called a plane, another invention since you left us.

Your story has been of great interest to both the Delahoys and the Holdsworths, but despite years of searching, there is so much we wish you could tell us if we were to have a conversation. Just in case we have it wrong, this is what we know.

When you married William Delahoy (did you call him Will or Willy, Bill or Billy or was it always William), you did not state your parents’ names but when you married Henry Holdsworth 19 years later, your marriage certificate records that your parents were Daniel Casey and Mary Ryan Casey. My dear husband has spent years trying to find out about your life in Ireland and we were sad to learn that you were in a workhouse in Clonmel. What was it like? How old were you when you went there? What did you do all day? According to one of Ian’s paid researchers in Ireland, Daniel and Mary had 2 other children, Mary and Margaret. What happened to them, Ellen?

About 20 years after you were born, the Irish Republic (like most of the world) started a Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages in 1864, but when you were born (in either 1832 or 1834), it was only church records that stand to tell us anything about you. There are no death records for Daniel, Mary, little Mary or Margaret and we are guessing that they died in what was called The Great Hunger (outside Ireland it was called the Irish Potato Famine). We feel so much for you, losing your parents and sisters and we don’t know how old you were at the time. Your age is a bit vague, according to the Clonmel Workhouse departure records, you were 16 when you came to Australia but from the church records you were actually 18. Perhaps you didn’t know either, or maybe you couldn’t have come to Australia if you were above 16 so somebody at the workhouse put your age down.

You would not have known it but the Irish were not held in high regard and the English didn’t want to go on paying for them in workhouses, so they shipped off as many as they could to Canada, America and Australia. Sadly, even though it is over 150 years since you came, the same countries are still reluctant to take people who are refugees, be it from famine or war. Over 1 million people died in Ireland during The Great Hunger, and about another million left Ireland.

After the Elgin docked in Adelaide on 10 September 1849, where did you go Ellen, we can’t find you! Many of the others on the ship became servants to landholders in Adelaide but we can’t find what happened to you or William Delahoy after you got to Australia. He landed exactly one month after you when he came on the Cheapside! Where did you meet him? Did you work together? Were you happy? Was he good to you?

Records tell us you married him on 6 March 1851, just under 18 months after you got to South Australia. We went to that church, St John’s in Adelaide, to have a look. Its much bigger now Ellen, and Adelaide is a large thriving city with all sorts of modern things which I won’t try to tell you about as it is too much. There is a small part of the church with some original bricks and we tried to imagine your wedding there.

So here you are, a married lady at 17, and all that we know about you is what I have written here. Did you make friends with any of the other girls on the ship? What work did you do? Did William make friends when he came? Did you have anybody left in Ireland, or did you lose them all?

We have assumed that you never had the chance to be educated and that possibly for the whole of your life you could neither read nor write? Ellen, these days women have wonderful opportunities and England even had a woman Prime Minister, Ireland had a woman President and women are now in many of the high positions in countries and businesses all around the world, which in your day would only have been open to men.

The next reference to you is when you became a mother – congratulations! Sadly, your first little boy John died at only 4 1/2 months in January 1853. From the family trees of others, we learn that unfortunately a lot of babies died back then. You will be pleased to know, I hope, that these days we have had wonderful progress in medicine and it is very rare for babies to die in Australia. There are now scans where cameras are built into medical equipment and we can see pictures of babies in the womb, and check that they are okay. Can you imagine such a thing, Ellen! Before babies are born, parents can know if it is a boy or a girl and if it might have any health problems.

However, before the end of the year, God sent you Emma Louise on 24 December – a Christmas Eve baby and what a lovely Christmas gift. I imagine you must have been so happy.

It seems from records that you had either one or two more disappointments with babies dying young, in Murray and Burra. What happened in Burra? We know you and William were there because you had 2 babies there and their births were recorded, but you weren’t on the Census. Perhaps you lived out of town? Maybe the census collector didn’t do the job very well? Anyway, you were in Kooringa within the Burra District there when your son William Jnr was born in June 1856. So now you have 2 healthy children!

You and William must have decided to move to Victoria some time in the next 2 years as in October 1858 your next son Walter was born at Pleasant Creek (they call it Stawell now). George, your next boy, was born at Navarre Diggings in 1860 so we think William must have been a miner. Did he go away to chase gold? Did you go with him? We notice that there is a gap of 4.5 years between George and Ellen Junior’s birth so we wonder if he was away? Ellen, somebody invented mobile phones which means that a husband and wife can telephone each other any time of the day or night. How hard it must have been for you at times of separation, never knowing when you would see William again.

From what we can piece together, and our apologies if it is wrong, we believe that William left the family to go to Omeo to find gold, and that you last saw him in November 1861. It is your marriage certificate which tells us that. The family story, true or not, is that soon after William left for the goldfields, you were told that he was dead and that you were now a widow with 4 living children to support, so you proceeded with your own life. We think that at this time you began (or already had) a store in the town of Great Western.

By this time you had met your dear Henry, but although you did not marry until 1870, we think that you and Henry had created Ellen, Rosaline and, a few days after your marriage, Henry Robert. We imagine the law at that time was you had to wait 7 years to have William declared dead before you could marry. You married at the home of a Mr Blair in Barkly. We know little of Henry Holdsworth except that he ran the Hotel at Great Western (parts of it still stand, Ellen!). Your Henry must have been a very nice man as our family tree tells us that your two Delahoy boys, Walter and George, each had a son whom they called Henry Holdsworth Delahoy so we think he must have been a fine stepfather to them.

Our records show that your first husband William actually didn’t die till 18 April 1870, and that he was at Livingstone Creek, Omeo, Victoria. The person who told the coroner his name was the local publican, who knew only his name but not where he came from or if he had a family. Did you ever find this out later? It would be nice to think that you did not and that it was just recorded in a town a long way from you and word never reached you. William was buried in an unmarked grave in the Omeo Cemetery and today when you enter the cemetery, there is a rock with a plaque on it with the names of those known to be buried there, but not the precise location of their resting place.

Great Western is best known now for the wine produced in the area which has become quite famous. It is only a tiny town between Ararat and Stawell but there is a Delahoys Road there these days. It is common for roads to be named after local pioneers.

William has not been a lucky name in the Delahoy line, Ellen. Your husband William died alone without his family at Omeo in 1870. Your son William also died alone in 1887 at Broken Hill (and his death was incorrectly registered as Walter Delahoy so it took us a while to find him). Your grandson William was an alcoholic who always needed help from others. Your great-grandson William died unmarried in a motor bike accident. Your great-great grandson David William lived only 13 days.

In 1881, you were Mother of the Bride when your daughter Ellen was 16 and married Tom Humphrey.

In 1886 you lost your youngest child (and third daughter) when Rosaline Holdsworth passed away at 19.

In 1887 your year begins well when George marries Ellen Eldridge in June and you gain a daughter-in-law. Tragically, just 4 months later in October your daughter Emma Louise dies suddenly in your arms. Six weeks later your son Walter marries Ellen Mitchell and you gain another daughter-in-law. Tragedy comes again 3 weeks later when your son William dies alone in Broken Hill on 18th December. His death certificate names him as Walter Delahoy, and as with your first William, those in the area do not know if he has any family or where he is from so we wonder if you ever knew what happened to him.

Walter and his Ellen have seven children, 5 of whom reach adulthood. Sadly, the ones they name after you (Nellie and Henry) do not survive childhood.

George and his Ellen also have 7 children. The first is a girl whom they call Emma Louise so George must have been very fond of his sister. He probably intended to call the next one Ellen after you, but no more girls ever came and he had six sons. All these children survive to adulthood. We know that Henry Holdsworth sold the Great Western Hotel to your son George who ran it for many years, until his death after being kicked by a horse. His widow (also Ellen) and her family then moved around a lot to make a living. We know of them at Redcliffs, Pomona, Merbein, Speed, and Woomelang at least.

Your son Henry Robert Holdsworth (did you call him Henry, Robert, or something else?) marries Margaret Daly in 1897 and that marriages produces 9 or 10 children, 6 of whom survive into adulthood.

They too have only one surviving daughter and call her Rosaline Ellen, after your daughter and yourself. We are not sure about this as the record keeping was all done with pen and ink and many people could not write or spell well so mistakes were made. These days computers track us from birth till death and know every illness we have ever had, everywhere we have travelled and most of our personal information is recorded by the government.

Your beloved Henry, to whom you had been married for 36 years, died at Great Western at the age of 84 on 26 July 1906. You were not lonely very long, as 5 months and one week later, you also passed away at Great Western on 1 February 1907.

At the time of your death, you had 14 grandchildren from the Delahoy line, and 11 of them were boys! You also had 5 Holdsworth grandchildren at the time of your death, but Margaret and Henry continued to produce more after they lost you.

These days, Ellen, birth control is available to all and couples can decide how many children they want and when they want them. Three children is considered a ‘big family’, with most people having only one or two children and some couples choosing to have none. Babies can be delivered either naturally or surgically on a pre-set date. I wonder what you would have to say about that.

When people get to about 35, they seem to become very interested in their family roots so Ian has met with other branches of the Delahoy family to exchange information on Delahoys all around the world. Another lot are working on the Holdsworths so we are also in touch with them.

Women of your generation were such hard workers that unless they had family at home to write to, or kept diaries (and had time to write in them), little is known of their daily lives. Back then, and for probably another 50 years after you died, the lives of men are recorded and history books describe their comings and goings on in pioneer life.

So my dear I will close now, and be assured you are not forgotten, our journey to learn about you has taken your descendants all around the world, and indeed those descendants are now so spread out and too numerous to mention.

A family tree spreads into many branches, twigs and leaves and eventually the tree renews itself, so others will follow us who want to know about family history too.

Rest in Peace.

Jill Delahoy