Elisabetha (1842-?)

Elisabetha HILDEBRAND 1842-?

Elisabetha was born on the 12th of October 1842, the fourth of five girls in the family of Konrad Hildebrand I and Margaretha nee Bodenroeder; both the eldest and the youngest died in infancy. Two boys made up a family of five surviving children. Their father was the son of a baker but he could find only casual work as a farmhand to feed this sizeable family. As the children grew up in this unpromising environment they all looked past the boundaries of their village and of their country for a better future, and four of them migrated to the colony of Victoria.

The eldest sister, Juliana, was the first to go; she left, with three of her uncles, in 1854. The elder brother, Konrad, and the second girl, Anna Margaretha, left together eighteen months later. Other emigrants from the village included Johann Georg Seipp and Johannes Hildebrand III. Perhaps these were amongst the lucky minority of diggers who struck it rich, as they all went back to the village within three or four years of getting to the Golden Triangle – with the sole exception of Juliana, who was married and settled permanently in Australia.

Elisabetha’s brother Konrad was married in April 1861 in Nieder-Weisel (to a daughter of Johannes Hildebrand III). Their sister Anna Margaretha was also in the village at that time, as she applied for a permit from the district court at Butzbach on 25th March 1861 to take Elisabetha to Victoria to join their sister Juliana. The application shows that Anna Margaretha had returned to the village in 186O (presumably late in the year). It is unclear what happened after the permit was issued.

In October 1861, Anna Margaretha married Johann Georg Seip in Nieder-Weisel. Unless they left before the application was approved the two sisters could not have reached Melbourne in time for Anna Margaretha to get back to the village by her marriage date. The alternatives are that she changed her mind and did not even leave with her sister, or that she travelled with Elisabetha only as far as Liverpool and then returned.

Unfortunately, the shipping records have been searched in detail only as far as 186O and it is not known when (or even if) Elisabetha left England. There is no record of her marriage or death in Victoria up until 1888. Her sister Juliana Paravicini died in Parkes, New South Wales on 21st July 19O3.