as being a devout and strict minister of the cloth but with a sense of humour.
On her honeymoon, Marion and her husband, Harold McKim Graham, an ophthalmologist practising in Vancouver, came east to Hensall and arranged for her great grandfather, James Weir, then in his eighties, to be admitted to a hospital where he died. Margaret, on her honeymoon, with her bridegroom, Kenneth Blair, a wing commander in the RCAF later awarded the MBE, visited her grandfather, Reverend Richard, who upbraided her for wearing “silly high heels.” Marion and Margaret both remember staying at grandfather’s house over Christmas, where the Reverend Richard had erected a Santa Claus on the roof. The three young girls were bedded down in “Grandpa’s” study, which they loved. The walls were lined with books and the girls knew where to locate “Grandpa’s law books” and where to find accounts of “juicy law cases,” as they put it.
Mary, the third child of Reverend Richard married Lucien Phillips, the City Clerk of Saskatchewan, so perhaps it was through her husband’s connection that her sister, Elizabeth, became Saskatoon’s tax collector. Mary and Lucien Phillips had two sons, Roy and Nathan.
Reverend Richard and Margaret Moir Weir’s fourth child and eldest son, James, married Isobel Cross and had a distinguished career as a professor of engineering at McGill University. He died in 1941, leaving one son, James Craig Weir, who practised law in the west. At one time, Samuel Edward wanted him to join his London firm, but James declined.
The fifth child, George Moir Weir, became Minister of Education and Health in the government of British Columbia. Born between 1883 and 1888, he died in December of 1949. George is remembered as having a wonderful sense of humour. His daughters, Margaret and Moira and his nieces, Margaret, Marion and Isobel found even his asking of the blessing at mealtimes so hilarious that they were all reduced to helpless giggling. His wife, Marie, is remembered as being a “beautiful cook, but not an entertaining person.” It was George who kept the little girls in constant laughter, meanwhile maintaining a perfectly straight face.
Richard and Margaret Moir Weir’s sixth child, Archibald Richard, married Muriel May Taylor of Prince Edward Island in 1912. Ultimately, Archibald became the Registrar of the University of Saskatchewan. This couple had three children. James Donald of Calgary, a Rhodes scholar, was the winner of a further scholarship which took him to South America where he became Chief Geologist of Standard Oil of California. The other son, John Arnold, born in 1916, became Professor of Genetics at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, Kansas. Margaret Phyllis, the third child, born in 1919, married Reginald McNally and went to live in Charlottetown, PEI.
The youngest child of Reverend Richard and Margaret Moir Weir to survive (the two last born died as infants) was John Alexander, born in 1890, while the Reverend Richard held a charge in a bordering state of the United States. Also a Rhodes Scholar, the first in the Weir family to gain this prestigious award, John Alexander, became the first Dean of the Law School at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He married Elizabeth Teviotdale, born in England. There were three children of this marriage. Elizabeth, born in 1927, who, after gaining her Ph.D in Chemistry, taught at Carnegie Technological Institute in Pittsburgh. Her married name was Toor. Ramsay, born in 1929, graduated in medicine and went on to practise as an internist in Camrose, Alberta. The youngest child, also John Alexander, born in 1933, graduated in law and became a lawyer in Edmonton. As a student of law in London, England, John Alexander junior met Samuel Edward while he was attending the Commonwealth Law Conference in 1955. Together they travelled for a few days to Ballymena in Ireland as Samuel Edward was interested in tracing his ancestry there. John Alexander remembers seeing the old family linen weaving mill and also remembers seeing a family connection on a tombstone depicting a skull and crossbones, the grave of a privateer from Hanover, whose money apparently started the mill.
ROBERT AND MARTHA SUTTON WEIR, M. 1854
The third child and second son of Archibald and Mary Currie Weir, Robert, Samuel Edward Weir’s grandfather, was born in 1824. He became a Presbyterian minister or so it was said by the family, although there is no appropriate listing in the Presbyterian Church records. Later he joined the Methodist Church, in which he was ordained. In 1854, he married Martha Sutton, as already mentioned, the younger sister of Susannah, James’ wife. She had taught school and also worked as a tailor. In her forty five years of life and twenty years of marriage, Martha bore ten children, all of whom lived with the exception of her firstborn son, Richard, who died in infancy. Because James, Robert’s elder brother, had relinquished his inheritance of the original Weir land holding, Robert and Martha took over the farm. Robert and Martha’s second and first living child, John died in 1890 at thirty four years of age and seems to have disappeared without a trace in all family documentation. There is no recording of his activities and no mention of a marriage nor of descendants.
Robert and Martha’s third child, George Sutton Weir, ordained as a minister, was a preacher of the Evangelical Methodist Church. He also graduated from the University of Western Ontario with a degree in medicine, gaining his M.D. in one of the first classes of the faculty in 1907. George Sutton married Sarah Bawtenheimer and of their five children, the fourth was Samuel Edward, the distinguished lawyer and collector of art who established River Brink and is the subject of this book.
Robert Weir, Samuel Edward Weir’s grandfather, born 1824; died 1907.
The fourth child of Robert Weir and Martha Sutton Weir, Samuel, born in 1860, had a distinguished career in the newly designated academic discipline of education. He received an A.B. from Northwestern in Chicago in 1889. In 1891, he graduated A.M. from Illinois Wesleyan and was ordained as a Methodist Episcopal minister, serving in Wichita, Kansas and Cheyenne, Wyoming. In 1889 he married Caroline Voss and a daughter, Helen Irene, was born to the couple in 1891. Upon Caroline becoming ill, Samuel brought his family back to Chicago and became an instructor in mathematics at Northwestern in 1892. After Caroline’s death in 1894, Samuel left the child with her maternal grandparents and enrolled in the University of Jena, Germany, to study philosophy, graduating with a Ph.D and the highest marks ever bestowed on a foreign student. In 1898 Samuel returned to the United States, married Sarah Richards, and was engaged as Professor of Ethics and History of Education at New York University. He established the first School of Education in the United States in 1897 with a faculty of three and himself as Dean. In 1901, he moved on to several colleges and eventually went to the College of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. There he taught until 1938, leaving a legacy of students across the United States acknowledging with gratitude his great influence on them. Although appearing to some as rigid and remote, his granddaughter, Margaret Markert, the daughter of Helen Irene, attests to a real warmth and concern not apparent on the surface. “I always felt he might be rather lacking in a sense of humour and prone to take himself very seriously,” she adds. This characteristic he seems to have shared with his brother, George Sutton Weir, the father of Samuel Edward.
Robert and Martha’s fifth child, Susannah, the first daughter, born in 1862, married Robert Burnett on January 2, 1889. Prior to her marriage she had taught school. They farmed in Hensall, Ontario and in 1899 took up a land grant in the Boscurvis Scout Mill district of the North West Territories, which became the Oxbow district of the newly constituted province of Saskatchewan in 1905. They had six children, the first, Martha, born in 1892 died at the age of fourteen. The second, Alexander, 1894-1982, also known as ‘Uncle Sandy,’ is well remembered.
During his bachelor days Alexander was a great favourite of his nieces and nephews. His niece, Agnes Eva Lynn, Edward Francis Burnett’s daughter, recalls his generosity with great fondness, giving presents to his nieces and nephews in the depressed thirties. In 1911, Alexander built himself a house in Oxbow, a very large house with a tower. Unfortunately raccoons climbed up to the roof and found it to their taste. The raccoon damage was responsible for the roof falling in and the house was demolished. During World War II, he collected a sizable amount of rubber for the war effort and his nieces remember being taken to the movies
