Category: Emerson Manitoba

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

Mattie Rixon and the Forrester Family

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Samantha Rixon, or Mattie as she was known, (1856-1929) learned the importance of family early in life. When Mattie was a teenager, her mother moved away, leaving her and her younger brother, Phineas, to be brought up by their grandparents. Both children were probably illegitimate, and their father was not around.

The children grew up in Cramahe Township, Northumberland County, Ontario, a rural area near Brighton and Lake Ontario. Their grandfather, Thomas Rixon (1793-1876), who was originally from England, worked as a carpenter and farmer. Their grandmother, Betsey Thompson (c. 1804-c.1872), had already brought up 12 children, but she was still willing and able to care for her two grandchildren.

Around the time her grandparents died, Mattie moved in with her married aunt, Ormacinda Rixon Fennell. Once again, a family member had come to her assistance.

In 1879, Mattie married John McFarlane Forrester1, nicknamed Jack. He was the son of a Scottish-born farmer from Melrose, in Tyendinaga Township, Hastings County, Ontario. The couple settle up housekeeping in a log cabin on the Forrester family farm. A year later, Mattie gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The boy, named Arthur, did not survive, but Lillian May2, the baby girl who was one day to become my grandmother, was placed in a box behind the woodstove to keep warm.

Jack was one of seven children, and land in Ontario was becoming too expensive for him and his four brothers to buy farms of their own. The Forresters agreed the best the solution would be for everyone to leave Ontario and start over on the western prairies, which were opening up to settlers at the time. The Forrester brothers and their father bought adjoining 160-acre lots near Emerson, Manitoba, close to the American border.

Farming in Manitoba was quite different from life in Ontario. The Forrester farm in Ontario had been fairly small and hilly, and the family had raised mixed crops and livestock. Now they were farming grain on the vast, flat prairies. Winters were longer and much colder, but the soil, subject to periodic flooding by the Red River, was fertile. And although two of Jack’s brothers moved to nearby Winnipeg to pursue careers there, those who remained in Emerson could count on each other to help with the farm work and enjoy social get-togethers.

Mattie and Jack raised six children: Lillian May, Arthur Wellington, John MacFarlane, William Drummond, Lulu Elda and Jessie Jean.3 According to her nephew Charles Reid Forrester, Mattie was devoted to her family.  In a memoir, he wrote: “Aunt Mattie … had been a school teacher in Ontario whose whole life was now devoted to caring for her family, milking cows and making butter, raising poultry, sewing, gardening and the thousand and one tasks incidental to running a farm home.

Samantha (Rixon) Forrester

“There was something special about Aunt Mattie’s bread, fresh from the oven, with its nutty flavor! Long years after she was gone, the rich aroma of her newly baked loaves greeted me one day as I opened the doors of her old cupboard, bringing back memories of those days when we were privileged to accept her kindness, while turning her house topsy-turvy in our games of hide and seek, hide the thimble, robbers, train, and whatever came to mind.” 4

One year the whole family visited California on a trip paid for by one of the Forrester brothers who was a successful real estate developer. When Jack and Mattie decided to retire from farming around 1911, they moved west again, this time to Los Angeles, where they bought a tiny house. Several other family members, including Mattie’s son Bill, also moved to California, but Mattie did miss her grandchildren in Canada. In 1928, she wrote to 13-year-old grandson Jimmy Hamilton (my future father), “When I think of you boys growing so much since I came here I feel a bit sorry I’ll never see you again as little boys. I watch your cousins here and make comparisons, but I know you will be my boy at all times, will you not?”

That letter also made it clear that Mattie knew how lucky she had been to be surrounded by family all her life. She told Jimmy, “I am too old to sleep more than 6 hours so up I get and go out beside the gas heater where I am now and read or write or sew for unfortunate kiddies who have not a mother or grandma.”

Mattie died in Los Angeles on May 15, 1929, aged 72, just a few months after she lost her husband.5

Notes

I knew nothing about Mattie, not even her name, until a few years ago. Then, a distant cousin sent me a copy of a photo of Mattie with a note on the back, written by my grandmother, Lillian Hamilton. That note turned out to have incorrect information, saying that her father had died and giving his name as Arthur Wellington Rixon. (See the two links below.)

Other details of Mattie’s adult life on the farm in Manitoba come from a privately published book written by her nephew Charles Reid Forrester. I found the letter she wrote to my father in his photo album.

This story was corrected and updated Dec. 2, 2018

See also:

Janice Hamilton, “The Ancestor Who Did Not Exist,” Writing Up the Ancestors, April 11, 2017, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2017/04/the-ancestor-who-did-not-exist.html

Janice Hamilton, “Martha J. Rixon’s Short and Difficult Life,” Writing Up the Ancestors, May 14, 2017,  https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2017/05/martha-j-rixons-short-and-difficult-life.html

Sources

  1. “Ontario Marriages, 1869-1927,” index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FMJS-B42 : accessed 8 June 2015), John Mcfarlane Forrester and Samantha Rixon, 26 Jul 1879; citing registration, Shannonville, Hastings, Ontario, Canada, Archives of Ontario, Toronto; FHL microfilm.
  2. “Canada Births and Baptisms, 1661-1959,” index, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:F2KY-L6B : accessed 8 June 2015), Samantha L. Rixon in entry for Lilian May Forrester, 11 Oct 1880; citing Tyendinaga, Hastings, Ontario, 11 Oct 1880, reference 520; FHL microfilm 1,845,398.
  3. “1901 Census of Canada”, Manchester, Provencher, Manitoba; Page: 3; Family No: 25, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 8 June 2015), entry for Samantha Forrester; citing Library and Archives Canada. Census of Canada, 1901. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: Library and Archives Canada, 2004. http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/census/1901/Pages/about-census.aspxl. Series RG31-C-1. Statistics Canada Fonds. Microfilm reels: T-6428 to T-6556.
  4. Charles R. Forrester, “My World in Story, Verse and Song”, printed by Friesen Printers, Altona, Manitoba, 1979.
  5. “California, Death Index, 1905-1939”, database, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 8 June, 2015), entry for Samantha Forrester; citing California Department of Health and Welfare, California Vital Records-Vitalsearch (www.vitalsearch-worldwide.com). The Vitalsearch Company Worldwide, Inc., Pleasanton, California.