Originally transcribed as Miss B. B. Don
Biography contributed by Jean Drage, great-great-granddaughter of Marion Dickson (nee Don) who was Elizabeth’s youngest sister
Elizabeth (named Euphemia at birth) was born in Labert, Stirling in Scotland on 20 October 1864 and travelled to Dunedin in New Zealand the following year with her mum (Isabella, nee Rae) to join her dad, James Don. Elizabeth was the eldest of eleven children, only eight of whom survived.
Along with her brother William, she was one of the first to be enrolled at Mornington school, one of Dunedin’s first schools, in the first decade it was opened. At the time, there were little more than one hundred students and two teachers. Unlike her brother, however, Elizabeth went on to work in the family home to learn the skills of running a household.
Elizabeth was only 18 when her mother died (of pneumonia) so she took on the role of raising her siblings (aged between 16 months and 16 years) from then onwards. She did not marry but continued living with and caring for her father in the family home in Rosebery Street in Dunedin after everyone left home. She was known as Aunt Lizzie to her twenty one nieces and nephews.
Elizabeth sustained this caring role throughout her entire life. In fact, she would have been 77 years when she helped to nurse William’s wife, Rachel, prior to Rachel’s death in 1941. Rachel Don was well known throughout the country for her extensive work for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and other national and local organisations advocating for changes for women.
Elizabeth was 29 when she signed the suffrage petition in South Dunedin in 1893. She also enrolled to vote in 1893. She died, aged 79 years, on 13 June 1943 and is buried in Andersons Bay cemetery.
Sources
Jean Drage, James and Isabella Don. A Family History (2022), an unpublished family history deposited in Toitū Otago Settlers Museum in Dunedin.
Lynne Frith, ‘Rachel Don 1866-1941. Church and Community Worker’, The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Volume Three, 1901-1920, Auckland University Press and the Department of Internal Affairs, (1996), pp. 137-138.
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