Ellen Fanny was born in May 1837 and baptised the following month:
All Saints Brightlingsea, 25 June 1837, privately, Ellen Fanny dau of Lazarus and Mary ROBERTS, Brightlingsea, Lieutenant Royal Navy, received into the church 11 May 1840.
Of all Lazarus and Mary’s children there is the least to say about Ellen. She never married and most likely cared for her father until his death.
In the 1871 census, when she was thirty-three, she was declared as deaf. There was no indication of this in the 1861 census (nor, curiously, in 1881 or 1891), but maybe this held her back in adult life?
Following Lazarus’s death in 1873 I assume his house at St James Place was given up as Ellen went to live with her sister Catherine and brother-in-law, the Stephenses at Hill Park Crescent. She was described as an annuitant in 1881.
When Catherine died in 1910, Ellen moved in with two of the Stephens children: her nephew Edward, an Admiralty clerk, and niece Frances, a thirty-six-year-old governess. Their address was 9 South View Terrace, Compton, Plymouth.
Ellen died on 8 January 1916, at Headland Park, Plymouth and was buried with her father at Ford Park Cemetery (see here for a photograph).
She left £272 17s 1d to her sister Mary Mackenzie Smyth and her Stephens niece and nephews: Frances, Robert, Edward and Frederick. Frances was the sole executrix.
As Lazarus’s only unmarried daughter, Ellen had been the primary beneficiary of his will in 1873. She presumably passed on whatever of her father’s possession she still had in 1916 (the large and small bibles?) to Mary or one of Catherine’s children, although there is no mention of this in her will.