Biography contributed by Katherine Blakeley
Fanny North was born in 1852 in Victoria, Australia – the daughter of James North and Sarah Sheppard. She came to Lyttleton in 1860 on the 'Active' with her parents and five siblings.
On 1 September 1866, Fanny married Joseph Scarambole, a fisherman from Port Chalmers. They had a son the following year, then Joseph disappeared from the records and Fanny married Philip Beck, a bootmaker, in 1870. They had five children, one dying in infancy. Philip was declared insolvent in 1879 and in July 1882 Philip was charged with assaulting his wife. He was 'subject to mental aberration' and ordered to keep the peace or face imprisonment. In November of the same year Fanny was granted a married womans’s property protection order on the grounds of cruelty on the part of her husband. A year later Fanny, now a boarding house keeper, was declared insolvent.
When she signed the suffrage petition Fanny was living in Melville St, Dunedin, with her eldest son, Joseph Scarambole Beck.
Philip died in 1910 - he is buried in the Port Chalmers Cemetery with his first wife. Fanny died on 20 April 1935, and she is buried in the Andersons Bay Cemetery with her son Philip.
Sources
BDM online NZ https://bdmhistoricalrecords.dia.govt.nz/
BDM Victoria http://www.justice.vic.gov.au/
DCC Cemetery Records http://www.dunedin.govt.nz/facilities/cemeteries/cemeteries-search
Family Search https://www.familysearch.org
Otago Nominal Index http://marvin.otago.ac.nz
Papers Past https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz
Click on sheet number to see the 1893 petition sheet this signature appeared on. Digital copies of the sheets supplied by Archives New Zealand.
Community contributions