Author: Janice H.

Lillian Forrester: Growing Up on the Farm

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My father’s mother was born in rural Ontario and grew up on a farm on the Manitoba prairie, but that doesn’t mean she wanted to live on a farm all her life. In fact, she had other plans.

There were basically two career paths open to women in the early 20th century: teaching and nursing. She pursued both. Then, when she married a Winnipeg physician, her future in the city was assured.

Lillian May Forrester (1880-1956) was the daughter of John Macfarlane Forrester (known as Jack) and his wife, Samantha Rixon (known as Mattie).1 Lillian’s twin brother, Arthur, died the day of their birth, but, according to a family story, Lillian was placed in a box behind the woodstove to keep warm, and she survived.

Lillian with her mother and brother, Art

The Forrester farm was located in Tyendinaga, near Belleville, Ontario. The property was quite small and the Forresters were a large and expanding family. They needed more land. Good farmland was becoming scarce and expensive in Ontario, while Manitoba, which had recently been opened up to settlement, looked very attractive.

In 1881, the Forresters bought land near Emerson, close to the American border and the Red River. Lillian’s parents farmed one property, her uncle William farmed the property across the road and her grandparents, James and Janet Forrester, farmed an adjoining half section with their son Donald. Lillian grew up with her five younger brothers and sisters and many cousins. According to Lillian, the Forresters “loved” their new home on the prairie.2

There was always work to do and, as the eldest of the children, Lillian must have had to do chores, such as helping to care for the animals. She had a bossy personality (years later she was nicknamed The Duchess), so she probably told the younger children what to do.

In a memoir,Lillian’s cousin Charles Reid Forrester wrote that the Forresters had their share of hardships. One year the crops were flattened by a hailstorm, and another time, lightning struck Grandpa Forrester’s stable, killing two horses, a cow and a sheep. 3 Lillian may also have remembered her grandmother’s flower garden, her mother’s freshly baked bread, and festive family parties when everyone danced to the music of the piano, violin and mouth organ and her father sang his favourite Scottish ballads. 

She was exposed to many books and ideas at home. Cousin Charlie described Jack Forrester as very intelligent and a student of American and Scottish history, 4 while Lillian later wrote that she owed a special debt to her grandmother, who was an avid reader and a poet.5

Lillian right column third row down

Lillian attended the Des Marais school, a one-room schoolhouse that served the area. After graduating, she became a teacher herself,6   but she must have decided that teaching was not the right career for her.   

By the early 1900s, nursing had become a modern, well-organized profession, with nursing schools open across Canada.7Perhaps Lillian thought there was a need for better medical care in rural communities, or maybe she saw this as an opportunity to move to the city. Whatever her motivation, she applied to the Winnipeg General Hospital School of Nursing.

She was 25 years old when she graduated, however, she did not work as a nurse for long. A year later, she married Dr. Thomas Glendenning (T.G.) Hamilton. T.G. practised medicine, surgery and obstetrics just across the river from the expanding city of Winnipeg.  

The wedding took place in November, 1906 at Lillian’s uncle’s Winnipeg home. Three years later, the first of the couple’s four children was born and in 1910, the Hamiltons’ newly built three-storey house in suburban Elmwood was ready for them. It was Lillian’s home for the rest of her life.

This article is also posted on https://genealogyensemble.com

See also:

Janice Hamilton, “Exploring Emerson,” Writing Up the Ancestors, Feb. 14, 2014, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2014/02/exploring-emerson.html

Janice Hamilton “James and Janet Forrester,” Writing Up the Ancestors, Feb. 5, 2014, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2014/02/james-and-janet.html

Janice Hamilton, “Mattie Rixon and the Forrester Family,” Writing up the Ancestors, June 8, 2015, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2015/06/mattie-rixon-and-forrester-family.html

Sources:

  1. “Ontario Births, 1869-1912,” database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:9Q97-Y3SZ-37X?cc=1784212&wc=QZ3B-GHJ%3A1584203503%2C1584203606%2C1584213601: 15 January 2016), Births > 1880 > no 7692-15395 > image 349 of 801; citing Archives of Ontario, Toronto.
  2. Lillian Forrester Hamilton, “Our Ancestors,” photocopy of a four-page typed document, in my possession.
  3. Charles R. Forrester, My World in Story, Verse and Song, self-published, Altona, Manitoba, 1979. p 29
  4. Charles Forrester, Ibid, p 109-110
  5. Lillian Hamilton, Ibid.
  6. 1901 census of Canada, Montcalm, Provencher, Manitoba, population schedule, page 3, family no. 25, Lillian Forester; digital image, Ancestry.ca (http://ancestry.ca, accessed 26 Nov. 2009); citing Library and Archives Canada, Census of Canada, 1901, Ottawa, Canada: Library and Archives Canada, RG31,T-6428 to T-6556.
  7. Anonymous. Wikipedia “History of Nursing” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_nursing, accessed Dec. 10, 2018

The Legacy

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I was left with a rather unusual legacy by my grandfather on my father’s side, Dr. Thomas Glendenning Hamilton. He was a well-known psychical researcher in Winnipeg, Manitoba in the 1920s and early 1930s, so for me, the question of whether it is possible to communicate with the dead is personal.  

T.G. Hamilton, as he was known to his friends, was born in Ontario in 1873 and died in Winnipeg in 1935, many years before I was born, but his research left a complex legacy for me and my cousins,1  and it continues to influence many people.

In its most common definition, a legacy is an amount of money or property inherited following someone’s death. In broader terms, it is something that is a part of your history. A family legacy can include pride in an ancestor’s accomplishments, or shame, bitterness and secrecy stemming from an ancestor’s misdeeds.

T.G. was active and respected in his community as a physician, and he was president of the Manitoba Medical Association. He served on the local school board and, as a member of the provincial legislature, he helped introduce votes for women and a mothers’ allowance. He did not drink, was a strict Presbyterian and an elder in the church.

Hamilton family around 1934, left to right, top Glen, Jim; bottom Margaret, T.G., Lillian

He became interested in psychical phenomena when he and his wife, Lillian, received a message while table-tipping with friends one evening in 1920. Then another friend demonstrated powerful telekinetic abilities (telekinesis is the unexplained movement of objects) and they began experimenting in their living room. After a while, T.G. stopped the experiments. He was intrigued, but extremely skeptical. But in 1923, he received another message that he thought might be paranormal in origin, and he restarted his investigation under more controlled conditions.

They began holding weekly séances with a small group of friends, collaborating with two different mediums over a period of 15 years. T.G. tried to bring a scientific approach to his enquiries, photographing the séances, taking notes and keeping the séance room locked at all times to prevent fraud. Eventually, he overcame his initial skepticism and he began speaking publicly about psychical phenomena, giving lectures in Winnipeg, New York, London and other cities.

In a paper written shortly before he died, T.G. stated, “I used to the fullest extent my critical faculties in the examination and evaluation of results, and held above all a fixed determination to repeat productive séances over and over again until the phenomena were established not once but many times.… Of still another thing I am certain: this standard of workmanship I maintained throughout. We started with facts and with facts we have ended.”2 For T.G. this was all about the science, although his experiments do not meet the standards of today’s scientific method.

His interest in whether some aspect of human consciousness survives bodily death also needs to be seen in the light of his personal life, and of post-World War I society. In early 1919, a year before they started the experiments with telekinesis, T.G.’s and Lillian’s three-year-old son Arthur died during the great influenza epidemic. This devastating loss may have kindled T.G.’s interest in psychic phenomena. In addition, many people had lost loved ones in the war or from the flu, and interest in this field was common. As a result, and because of his personal reputation for integrity, T.G.’s professional standing as a physician did not suffer because of these experiments.  

So what has been the legacy of his enquiries for me? First, ambivalence. One day I think that my grandfather and his séance collaborators (including several doctors and lawyers) would not have met so frequently over such a long time period if they had believed their results were fraudulent. The next day, I suspect the table levitations, bell ringing and long conversations with a variety of deceased personalities were fake.  

I also feel a mixture of pride and embarrassment: pride in the fact that he was so well known, and embarrassment when people roll their eyes. At one time, this topic also elicited fear. When I was a child, the séance photos of images of the dead mysteriously appearing in ectoplasm (a white substance that looks suspiciously like cheesecloth) terrified me.

I often wonder what impact these séances had on the Hamilton family. Psychical research so distracted T.G. from his medical practice that, when he died of a heart attack, Lillian had no money and son Glen, by then a physician himself, had to support her. Lillian herself seems to have been the driving force behind these séances and was deeply involved in the research. All three of T.G.’s surviving children believed that what happened at those séances was authentic, and they no doubt paid a price for it. Glen later said that, when he was a child, his classmates teased him about living in a house full of ghosts.3

My father, the youngest of the Hamilton children, started attending the séances at age 15 and, in his 20s, he edited Intention and Survival, a book about his father’s work.4These experiences must have had a deep impact on my father’s life, but he seldom talked about it. As a physician in Montreal in the 1960s and 1970s, he was afraid this would harm his career.

As for daughter Margaret, she revered her father. She re-edited Intention and Survival and eventually wrote her own book about psychical research called Is Survival a Fact?  Her legacy includes the collection of documents and photos from T.G.’s research that now belongs to the University of Manitoba Archives.5 This material is used in courses on religion and social history, and it has inspired books, plays and works of art. Meanwhile, thousands of people have viewed the séance photos on the Internet.

Finally, my grandparent’s research has made me more curious than I might otherwise have been about the possibility of life after death. We all wonder about these things, but these questions have become part of my family history.

Updated April 29, 2019 to add more information. 

See also:

“Arthur’s Baby Book,” Writing Up the Ancestors, March 29, 2017, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2017/03/arthurs-baby-book.html “

Five Brothers,” Writing Up the Ancestors, Dec. 1, 2018, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2018/12/five-brothers.html

“A Musician in the Family,” Writing Up the Ancestors, Dec. 15, 2018, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2018/12/a-musician-in-family.html

“Jim Hamilton: A Life,” Writing Up the Ancestors, Sept. 30, 2015, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2015/09/jim-hamilton-life.html

Sources and Further Reading

  1. Janice Hamilton, “Bring on Your Ghosts”, Paranormal Review, London: The Society for Paranormal Research, issue 77, Winter 2016.
  2. Margaret Lillian Hamilton, Is Survival a Fact? Studies of Deep-Trance Automatic Scripts and the Bearing of Intentional Actions by the Trance Personalities on the Question of Human Survival, London: Psychic Press Ltd., 1969, p. 47.
  3. James B. Nickels. “Psychic Research in a Winnipeg Family: Reminiscences of Dr. Glen F. Hamilton.” Manitoba History, no 55, June 2007, p. 53.
  4. T. Glen Hamilton, Intention and Survival: Psychical Research Studies and the Bearing of Intentional Actions by Trance Personalities on the Problem of Human Survival, edited by James D. Hamilton, Toronto: the MacMillan Company of Canada, 1942.
  5. “Hamilton Fonds” University of Manitoba Libraries, (accessed Jan. 3, 2019) http://umanitoba.ca/libraries/units/archives/digital/hamilton/index.html.