Giraudon Family History & Genealogy

Mathilde Coriolis was born in Paris about 1837. She met Antoine Giraudon, son of Etienne and Marie Giraudon; he had moved from the Loire Valley to Paris for work. He was a carpenter and home decorator. The couple married in Paris in 1862 and emigrated to Victoria, Australia in 1865. Their only daughter, "Nellie" (Eleanore Marie Gabrielle) was born in Fitzroy, at that time a town just out of Melbourne, in July of that year. Three years later the family moved on to the South Island of New Zealand, landing at the gold-fields harbour of Hokitika on the West Coast before relocating further north to Westport. Not long after their arrival Antoine died of lead poisoning, presumably from the paints he was using. Mathilde stayed on in Westport, running a small sweet shop, until her death in 1877 at the early age of 40. Nellie became the ward of another French couple who ran a hotel in the small gold-mining settlement of Zalatown in the Buller Valley, east of Westport. Mathilde's family name was Coriolis, but the registrar in Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia spelt it phonetically when recording Nellie's birth.

Eleanor was born at 71 George Street, (the private hospital of a Dr. Bennett), Fitzroy, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 20 July 1865, the only daughter of Antoine Giraudon and Mathilde Corriolly, his wife. Her French parents were immigrating to New Zealand (Antoine was born in Châteauroux, south of Orlens, in the Loire Valley, and Mathilde was born in Paris). They stayed in Australia for about three years. After arriving in Hokitika, New Zealand (about 1868) they settled at either Reefton or Westport on the West Coast of the South Island. Shortly after their arrival, Eleanor’s father died of lead poisoning (he was a carpenter, painter and paperhanger and must have taken in quite a bit of lead from the paints he was working with). Eleanor’s mother stayed on the Coast and ran a small sweet shop until her death in 1877 at the early age of 40. Eleanor, who was then 12, was made a ward of Louis Roulet and his wife Annette (Chapins) who were running the Alpine Hotel at Zalatown, a small mining town near Lyell, in the Buller District. The Roulets sent her to the convent school of the Sisters of Our Lady of the Mission in Nelson. Conditions in a rough mining environment would have been hazardous for a young girl and education would have been sketchy at the best. She lived at the orphanage attached to the school until she was 15 when her guardians brought her back to Zalatown. It seems that Annette ran a brothel in the hotel. Before Annette died in 1883 [Louis died in 1895] the Roulets arranged a marriage for Eleanor with Henry (Harry) Garbett, a mining contractor from Nelson, originally from Tipton, Staffordshire, England. He was living at the Alpine Hotel at the time. They were married at Lyell Registry Office, Buller, 5 November 1883 when she was only 18 and he was 31. In 1885 their first daughter, Thressa Maud, was born in Lyell. There followed a still-birth, a second daughter, Matilda, and five boys; Amos, William, Alfred, Henry and Albert (who later called himself ‘Peter’). By 1897 Henry (who came from a mining family in Staffordshire) was a manager of a goldmine for the Lyell Creek Mining Company in the Buller Valley. He died of tuberculosis at Lyell in 1905 at the age of 54. Prior to 1903 Eleanor and Harry separated. Harry was, by all accounts, a fairly violent man. Eleanor went to live with her second husband-to-be, James Jackson in Waihi (another gold-mining town), near Coromandel, in the North Island. A son, James, was born of that partnership, in 1903. [He was named ‘James Jackson Garbett’, presumably to overcome the problem of his being born ‘out of wedlock’]. Within a month of Harry’s death Eleanor married James Jackson and the couple had two more sons; John, born in 1905 and Victor, born in 1909. They returned to the West Coast some time after Harry’s death. Eleanor and James’s youngest son, Victor, died of diphtheria there, and was buried at either Lyell or Reefton. James Jackson died 11 May 1913 and by 1917 Eleanor had moved to 43 Sutherland Road, in Melrose, Wellington. Eleanor’s grand-daughter, Margaret Westgate writes, “In her later years she would call on Jim [her son] and Zoë [Margaret’s mother] every week. Zoë remembers her as being very kind; always bringing a bag of food, and lollies for the children. She always dressed in black. She enjoyed playing cards right up to the time she died and would often win prizes. She had an unfortunate habit of stepping off the kerb without looking (usually while walking home at night after cards). She ended up in hospital on several occasions, but always recovered. She finally died very suddenly, in bed with a cup of cocoa beside her, waiting to be drunk. She wasn’t discovered for two or three days when relatives became suspicious of not hearing from her and called around to her flat.” Eleanor died in Wellington, 31 October 1951, when she was 85 years old and was cremated 2 November.

Antoine was a house painter, wallpaperer and carpenter. Shortly after his arrival in New Zealand he died from lead poisoning, presumabley from the paints he was using.