256 Pa. 470 | Pa. | 1917
Opinion by
By the Act of April 29, 1913, P. L. 118, provision was made for monthly payments, after approval by trustees appointed by the governor, to “indigent, widowed, or abandoned mothers, for partial support of their children in their own homes.”, This was changed by the Act of June 18,1915, P. L. 1038, which provides that such payments are to be made “to women who have children under sixteen years of age and whose husbands are dead or permanently confined in institutions for the insane, when such women are of good repute, but poor and dependent on their own efforts for support, as aid in supporting their children in their own homes.”
The proceeding under review on this appeal was instituted in the court below for the procurement of a writ of mandamus to compel the auditor general of the Commonwealth .to draw his warrant upon the state treasurer for the payment of a sum of money to the mother of four children, a resident of the County of Philadelphia. The relators are trustees duly appointed by the governor for that county. The facts involved were agreed upon in a case stated. Benjamin Wilbur, the husband of Edwina Wilbur, the mother of the four children, disappeared in the year 1906, and has never been heard of since. The trustees, in view of his unexplained absence for seven years and upwards, found that he was dead, and approved the application of his wife for the relief provided for by the statute. The learned court below sustained the application for relief on the ground of the presumption of the death of the applicant’s husband. The correctness of this is the sole question before us.
The women for whom charitable provision is made by the Act of 1915 are not, as under the Act of 1913, those whose husbands have abandoned them, but those “whose husbands are dead or permanently confined in institutions for the insane,” and, before trustees can award relief under the later act, it must appear to them that the
The judgment for the relators on the case stated is reversed, and is here entered for the defendant.