E. J. Edwards

Biography contributed by Helen Edwards.

Eliza Jane Bennetto was born on 22 March 1856 in Victoria, Australia. Her parents, William and Jane Bennetto, took their family to New Zealand about 1864, probably to try their luck on the goldfields. From 1871-1880 they lived at Canada Reef, in the Table Hill district near Milton, where William Bennetto junior owned a claim. An Otago Daily Times reporter noted in 1872 that ‘substantial houses for the workmen are springing up in the vicinity of the reef’. Eliza married Sim Edwards in Milton on 25 September 1874, while she was still a minor. Sim was born in Oyne, Aberdeenshire, in 1849, and named after his father. He emigrated about 1870 and lived in the Tokomairiro district. Eliza had ten children between 1874 and 1892. Eliza and Sim settled in Dunedin about 1881, and by 1887 were living in Church Street (now Nairn Street). Sim is listed in directories as being ‘of Edwards and McIntyre’, a bone manure manufacturing business, which went bankrupt in 1895. They moved house after 1895 and Eliza died in 1904, at the age of 48. Sim died in 1918, aged 69. They are buried together in the Southern Cemetery, Dunedin.

Main sources

ancestry.com
Births death & marriages online. Dept. of Internal Affairs
The Canada Quartz Reef. Otago Daily Times, 21 March 1872.
Cemeteries search. Dunedin City Council
Electoral rolls on microfiche and ancestry.com
mindat.org
OASES. Toitu Otago Settlers’ Museum
Otago & part Southland, New Zealand : Presbyterian marriages at Hewitson Library, Knox College, Arden Street, Dunedin, New Zealand : index to brides & grooms, 1848-1920. [Compiled 1990] by Eleanor Leckie and Janice Nolan.
Otago Nominal Index. Hocken Collections, University of Otago.
Stone’s Otago and Southland commercial, municipal and general directory … Dunedin: Stone & Co., 1884-