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workrooms for carrying out domestic and farm chores. It was a practical home, built
to serve the purposes of its owners.
Although the home was completed around 1865, Maria Gervasoni gave birth
that year to her first child, John (Giovanni?) Battista, in the neighbour's home where
she was living, the birth of all the Gervasoni children outside the family home
suggesting the need for a midwife. A second child, Louisa, was bom in 1867. Though
some members of the company were still living in the house at this stage, it was not
long before Invemizzi and Antonio Gervasoni left the business partnership to set up
homes of their own nearby. Documents relating to the sale of their share in the
company reveal stock and implement holdings at that time as: 90 head of cattle, two
horses, two drays and a spring cart, sixteen large pigs, twelve small pigs, 25 goats, 100
fowls, sixteen geese, five ducks, household furniture and farming implements. The
crops of the past harvest, the present vintage of grapes, butter and cheese were to be
sold over the foUowing three months.^* The remaining members of the partnership
continued to trade their dairy products, vegetables, fmit, wine and other food-stuffs in
the local district, seUing butter under the trade name 'Acom' and honey under the
trade name 'Beehive'. They also co-operated a mine under land which belonged to
Giuseppe. With their growing prosperity, the Gervasonis were elevated above the
peasant status defining most of their countrymen, becoming distanced from, not only
their families in Europe, but also some of those Italian speakers who had made it to the
Colony.
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