Histories

William Delahoy and Ellen Casey were married at St John's Church South Adelaide on 6th March 1851. Their first born, John William, was born on 1st August 1852 in Burra, South Australia (north of Adelaide) and died of pneumonia five months later on 15th January 1853.

The second child, Emma Louise, was born 24th December 1853 also in Burra. The birth certificate states "Emma Louise" while the headstone at Great Western states "Emma Louisa". Ian states, "My father told me that Emma was coming home from school and was caught in a thunderstorm. She took shelter under a tree which was struck by a lightning flash and this affected her sight. It slowly deteriorated from then and she was completely blind by 1881. She never married and remained at home with her mother." Emma died at Great Western on 2nd December 1887.

An unknown male child is believed to have been born in 1854 and possibly a second in 1855.

On 30th June 1856, William was born at Kooringa, District of Burra, South Australia.

Nothing is known about them for the next two years. They possibly returned to Adelaide and then turned east and headed into western Victoria probably along what is now the Western Highway. Alternatively, they may have headed into what is now southern New South Wales before turning south and heading down into western Victoria. William was presumably looking for gold.

Walter was born 14 Oct 1858 at Pleasant Creek, Victoria (for a short time, a thriving gold field) and George was born at Navarre (Diggings), near Avoca, Victoria on 27 Oct 1860.

Navarre, Barkly, Frenchmans Creek and Moonambel are all in the general vicinity of Avoca. There's no town called Navarre Diggings in contemporary maps so I assume the reference is to the gold fields near the town. Here's a short history of Pleasant Creek (later known as Stawell).

William left Ellen in November 1861, apparently to continue gold prospecting on his own and Ellen subsequently raised her family as a single mother for the next eight years. There is talk of a 'matrimonial cloud' but the reality is no one knows why William left and gold seems the most likely motivation. He apparently was a heavy drinker so it's possible he was thrown out.

Jill says, "My sister has done a lot of genealogy research and she tells me there was a special law back in the goldrush days as thousands of men left their families and were never heard from again or rumours that they had died abounded but no paperwork, or they were just not known to anybody and unidentified. The family story was ... that Ellen was told William died shortly after he left home and she married Henry Holdsworth in the belief she was a widow, only to learn later that he actually died much later and for a while she was [technically] a bigamist. The law I am speaking about was to protect women to whom that had happened as she wasn't the only one."