Elizabeth was born at Emerald Hill in 1855. Her parents, Edward Owen and Elizabeth Evens, were both from Wales. They met and were married at Liverpool in England in 1850 and sailed from there to Victoria in 1852. Lured by the news of fresh discoveries of gold in the Kingower/Inglewood region, Edward, or Taffy as he was known, and his family moved from Melbourne to Bet Bet near Dunolly around 1857 and then on to Kingower. The old couple remained there through the town's boom and bust periods - the population of Kingower peaked at around 8,000 in the 1860s, before declining to just 100 by the time of Edward's death in 1908. His wife Elizabeth died in Kingower in 1893. They are both buried in unmarked graves in Kingower's fast disappearing cemetery. In the same year he was married, Henry Edward's stepmother, Harriet Hickmott née Waters, was killed when she was struck by lightning at her home in East Charlton. The incident was recorded in the "St Arnaud Mercury" on 17 February as follows:  'About 5pm on Wednesday a severe thunderstorm burst over East Charlton, and an hour later Mrs Hickmott and her son Samuel (a youth of 18 or 20) had just returned to their home in that township after a visit to a selection belonging to the family at Watson's Lakes, when a flash of lightning struck them both dead in the doorway of their house … Mrs Hickmott was thrown several yards out of the building, the apparel around her chest and shoulders being set ablaze, and her face much disfigured by the electric current, which appears to have struck her on the head and traveled down her right side. Her son Samuel was smitten on the right shoulder the current passing diagonally across his body until it came to his heart, his clothing being burnt even to the undershirt. Another son, named James, who was indoors at the time, was struck on the left forearm and hip, and for a time was paralysed, but has since recovered.'. While at Charlton, Henry Edward worked mainly as a brick maker and building and roads contractor, with evident success. In 1881, he purchased a farm at West Charlton and in 1885 had built, on Camp Street in the eastern part of the town, a four-roomed brick house. This and a similar dwelling built for his stepbrother, John James Hickmott, were, the leader writer of the East Charlton Tribune informed his readers, 'additional evidence of the increasing development of the rapidly rising town of Charlton which, at the present rate of progression, promises to become a large and populous provincial centre of activity'.