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Lawyer; state senator; author of Indiana's parole and dependent-children laws
On the record
Ellison, son of LaGrange lawyer Andrew Ellison, studied at Notre Dame in 1868 and at the University of Michigan, taking his LL.B. in 1874; admitted to the Indiana bar on 23 December 1873, he moved to Fort Wayne in February 1877 as partner of Judge Robert S. Lowry, and was admitted to the U.S. Circuit Court bar in 1880 and the U.S. Supreme Court bar in 1890. His public work ran to institutions: he sat on the Indiana Board of State Charities 1892–99, was vice-president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections in 1898, and as a state senator, 1895–99, drew the law for the care of dependent children — afterward adopted in principle by many states — and the law remodeling Indiana's penal system to establish parole and the indeterminate sentence. He was the first president of the Indiana Reformatory and a delegate to the International Prison Congresses at Brussels (1895) and Washington (1916). He married Emma Sophronia Stockbridge on 10 January 1878 and, after her death, Hannah Hall of Topeka on 14 December 1887.
Sources: Griswold, Pictorial History, Vol. II (1917), biographical sketch and portrait, read first-hand. No second source reached for this profile.