Category: Forrester

The Missionary Couple

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When Jessie Jean Forrester (1896-1961) married a Presbyterian minister, she committed herself to a very different life from the one she had been accustomed to growing up on the Manitoba prairie. For almost 25 years, the couple lived in India, where he served as a missionary.

There they were surrounded by the soaring Himalayas and elaborate temples, they suffered the heat of the central plains and humidity of monsoons, and they enjoyed eating Indian food.   There were some scary moments too. On one occasion, they were staying in a camp, complete with tea service. Jessie got up to go to the bathroom during the night and, as she was passing through the privacy screen, she saw a tiger roaming the camp.  

The youngest daughter of farmers Jack and Samantha (Rixon) Forrester, Jessie first left Manitoba as a teenager, accompanying her parents when they retired to Los Angeles around 1911.

Jessie Jean and her mother, Samantha Rixon.

The 1920 U.S. census found her at age 24, living with her parents and working as a book keeper for a hardware store. The following year, she and her mother were counted in the 1921 census of Canada, staying with Jessie’s older sister (and my grandmother,) Lillian Hamilton, and her family in Winnipeg. They were probably busy preparing for the wedding.  

Jessie’s husband-to-be, Thomas Benjamin McMillan, was born in 1888 in Margaret, Manitoba. The McMillan family eventually moved to Winnipeg. Tom graduated from Manitoba College with a degree in economics, then served as a lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. After the war, he returned to Winnipeg and completed a two-year course in theology.   

Jessie and Tom were married on August 17, 1921. Three weeks later, the newlyweds left for India. Daughter Hazel Lillian (born 1922) and son Hugh Forrester (born 1924) were both born in India and attended Woodstock School, Landour, a school founded in the 19th century to educate the children of American missionaries. They also attended school in Winnipeg during extended visits to Canada.  

Tom went to India as a Presbyterian minister, but after the creation of the United Church of Canada by Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregationalist congregations in 1925, he became a United Church missionary.  Much of his work was based in the central Indian cities of Hat Piplia, Neemuch and Indore, in the state of Madhya Pradesh. When the weather in central India became too hot, the family retreated to the twin cities of Landour and Mussoorie, in the foothills of the Himalayas. When son Hugh McMillan and his wife visited Mussoorie in 1979, they found the cosmos flowers Jessie had planted many years before still seeding themselves and blooming.1

Besides serving as a pastor, Tom was also active on several committees. In central India, he served as chairman of the building committee for 10 years and secretary of the Evangelistic Commission for three years, and he was a delegate to the General Assembly of the United Church of North India and chairman of the Assembly Business Commission.  

Tom and Jessie remained in India during World War II, but 19-year-old Hazel returned to North America in 1941 to stay her uncle and aunt in Los Angeles, and Hugh sailed to California in 1944.

Both were accustomed to long sea voyages, having travelled back and forth with their parents every few years to visit friends and relatives in Winnipeg and Los Angeles, but it must have been frightening for them to travel alone in wartime. Tom and Jessie came back to Canada for good after the war ended and before Indian independence.   

The McMillans settled in British Columbia, where Tom ministered to several United Church congregations. After he retired in 1960 at age 72, they settled in Victoria, where he continued to visit the sick and served as an associate minister at Oak Bay United Church until 1964.  

When Jessie died in 1961, aged 65, her obituary in the Ladysmith-Chemainus Chronicle called her “a woman of great dignity and artistic ability,” adding that the bazaars and festive occasions at the two local United churches where Tom had been minister for four years were made more attractive by her deft floral arrangements. Tom died in 1965 at age 77 and was buried beside his wife in Royal Oak Burial Park, Saanich, B.C..

Sources 

  1. Walter Meyer zu Erpen, Mrs. Jessie Jean (Forrester) McMillan (29 March 1896-16 September 1961), sister of Mrs. T.G. Hamilton (1880-1956), and Reverend Thomas Benjamin McMillan (26 June 1888-25 July 1965), BA (University of Manitoba). Draft research report, 2015/12/26. Walter gathered his research from a number of sources, including telephone interviews with family members and United Church of Canada records.  

This article is also published on the collaborative blog https://GenealogyEnsemble.com

Who Was Aunt Lou?

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It must have been around 1970, the year I graduated from university. Maybe I was visiting my parents in Montreal, trying to figure out my next step in life. My father was invited to a family barbeque and asked me to come along.  My mother didn’t like parties, so just Dad and I attended.  

Unfortunately, my memory of that party is hazy. Fifty years later, all I recall is a leafy back yard. I didn’t know my father’s cousins, and I was too shy to talk to anyone.   

The name of one person at that party stuck with me, however: my father’s Aunt Lou. I recently did some research and discovered why her name might have stood out.

The Forrester sisters, c. 1955: Jessie Jean McMillan, Lou Campbell, Lillian Hamilton

Born in 1892, Lou Forrester was the second-youngest of six siblings who grew up on a prairie grain farm near Emerson in southern Manitoba. My future grandmother, Lillian, was her older sister. Eventually the siblings all scattered. Both Lillian and Lou settled in Winnipeg.   

By the time that barbecue in Montreal took place, all the Forrester siblings except Lou had died, so it’s no wonder she held a special place in my father’s heart.   

The daughter of John McFarlane Forrester and Samantha Rixon, Lou was baptized Lulu Elda Forrester. She didn’t like that name and usually went by Lou, or Louise. According to a family story, she was named after a Hawaiian princess. Her father, who loved reading, was a fan of author Robert Louis Stevenson and may have found the name in something Stevenson wrote about Hawaii.  

At this time, few women worked, but Lou did have a career before she married: she trained as a nurse in Winnipeg and worked with newborn babies  

On June 29, 1915, she married Winnipeg lawyer John Fletcher Campbell. According to the Winnipeg Tribune, it was a pretty wedding, held at eight in the evening at King Memorial United Church. The days are long at that time of the year in Winnipeg, so the sun was low in the sky as they said their vows. The bride wore a cream satin dress with a short, full skirt, while the bridesmaid wore pink and the mothers of both the bride and groom were in black dresses. The bouquets included pink roses, sweet peas and forget-me-nots.  

Fletcher was a descendant of the Selkirk Settlers, most of them Scottish Highlanders who settled on the banks of the Red River in the early 1800s. Fletcher grew up in the brick farmhouse in the Winnipeg neighbourhood of East Kildonan that his father had built overlooking the river. Lou and Fletcher raised five of their six children there. One daughter died at age two.  

The house was large, and British Air Force pilots who were training near Winnipeg during World War II often billeted with the Campbell family.  

Fletcher died of a heart attack in 1944, leaving Lou a widow for 34 years. Fortunately, he had been a successful lawyer and does not seem to have left her with financial concerns. Granddaughter Barbara recalls that Lou wore a mink coat – considered a necessity in Winnipeg’s cold climate. 

For the first 16 years after her husbands’ death, Lou continued to live in the house in East Kildonan and focused her interests on her now grown children and her grandchildren. Great-niece Fran has happy memories of Lou coming to visit in London, Ontario and making wonderful cinnamon buns. Fran and her sister would watch in awe as Lou upended the bag of flour into the mixing bowl, then added the other ingredients without bothering to measure precisely, until the mixture felt right. According to another family story, Lou used to do the baking when sister Lillian, who was not a great cook, had guests for tea.

In 1960, Lou sold the house and moved to Vancouver Island to stay with her sister Jessie and husband Rev. Tom McMillan. After Jessie died in 1961, Lou lived for several years with daughter Alison Hermon in Montreal. It must have been during that period that the barbecue took place.  

Lou returned to Winnipeg when Alison’s family moved to Vancouver, but by that time she was ill. She was first hospitalized in Montreal, then admitted to Concordia Hospital in Winnipeg for long-term care. Daughter-in-law Sheila visited her bedside religiously, while great-niece Linda, a nurse on the ward at the time, also kept an eye on her. “Lou was rather a demanding soul,” Linda recalls, adding, “I remember clearly her having a ‘shot’ of sherry each night. We kept the bottle in the nurses’ station and it was doled out each evening as part of her bedtime routine.”

Lou Campbell died on Aug. 12, 1978, age 86. She is buried with her husband and several other Campbell family members in the old Kildonan Presbyterian Cemetery, Winnipeg.

(updated June 1, 2020 with new anecdotes)