opportunity came for a marriage with young Will Marshall, twenty three, and the son of a great lakes shipping owner in Owen Sound. Later in 1882, he and Frances, known in the family as Frankie, were married. From all accounts Will Marshall, who was put in charge of the family interests in Duluth, Minnesota, was a young man of considerable spirit and an overbearing husband. Being employed on a laker in the family company meant he was away from home a great deal and lived what was described as a rough life. Frankie lost a baby in 1883 and died shortly afterward.
Martha Amanda’s eldest daughter, Sarah, twenty-four years of age in 1884 and described by her exceptionally beautiful sisters as being “strikingly beautiful with lovely creamy skin, blue eyes and shining auburn hair,” was next to marry. Undoubtedly she was a lovely bride, but perhaps more simply dressed than Frankie was at her wedding. Sarah would have been an elegant figure nonetheless, probably in a gown of brown silk more than likely with a bustle in the very latest fashion. However, the wedding party must have been an unusual sight, the bride, a statuesque and commanding presence at just under six feet in height, and the groom, a slight man of 136 pounds and five and a half feet tall. As was customary, the bride was described on her marriage certificate as “spinster, resident of Owen Sound,” while George was described as a student, resident of Plympton. The couple was married by the Reverend George Clarke in the Wesley Methodist Church in Welland, Niagara County, with Mary Burgas and John Foss as witnesses. Although Sarah and her siblings wrote to one another with frequency in later life, there is no surviving communication, no card, telegram or greeting of any kind from Martha Amanda to her daughter, nor from the sisters on her marriage. Until the wedding day, the couple was each employed in Lambton County, but it was not an uncommon occurence for a couple to travel together to another settlement for the ceremony.
As a student for the ministry in Canada, George was prohibited from marrying prior to ordination, however, in the United States, he could become a circuit rider before ordination and marriage was permitted. Since Welland borders New York State, the newly wedded pair proceeded directly to George’s first posting at Grayling, in the Alpena District of the Detroit Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church where he was admitted on trial. It would seem that two very lonely young people, each from a home devoid of displays of affection and each raised in a hair shirt philosophy of service before self, as well as in poverty, had found each other. Leaving their country and their relatives was worth the risk. To be with one another was apparently their decision.
By 1885 Martha Amanda now had three unmarried daughters. However, her son-in-law, Will, was a widower and her eldest remaining daughter, Mary, was sixteen. She arranged for a photographer in Owen Sound to take their pictures in the elaborate and detailed high fashion of the 1880’s. The two older girls were great beauties and Laura Alberta was a very pretty child. Soon it was arranged that Mary would marry Will Marshall and take the youngest, a five year old, with her to Duluth. Laura Alberta, known as Bertie in the family, was to become a sort of skivvy for Mary, a pious young woman who took after her father in her ideas of rectitude. In the family it was said that Mary would rather walk through a muddy puddle than step over a playing card lying on the street. The religiously upright Mrs. Will and her rough living husband must have been quite a pair. Mary did produce two daughters over a period of time. In 1903 Sarah would travel to Duluth to be with her and assist with her first childbirth and again for the second child. In 1906 Mary was considered to be in fragile health and the second baby was brought back east by Sarah to be raised for a few months in her home. In the meantime Eva Jane married the lawyer Alexander Thompson of Paris and seems to have had a happy marriage. Later, her son Arthur Thompson would article with his cousin Samuel Edward.
On July 1, 1893, Martha Amanda was married for the second time to a farmer from the Owen Sound area, William Morrison Wilson. He was said by her descendants to have been mean and unkind to her. Martha Amanda did not reclaim her youngest, Bertie, now a child of twelve, once she remarried. Perhaps she felt that Bertie was better off in Duluth. This, however, was not quite the case. Bertie existed in a state of virtual slavery. She was responsible for scrubbing, cleaning and wringing out Will’s work clothing at midnight when he arrived home and had to be up at 3.30 a.m. to prepare his breakfast. Will apparently harassed her. When she was still a schoolgirl he made a serious attempt to assault her sexually, an act which was witnessed by two little friends who had come to call for her on their way to school. The mother of one told Bertie to tell the police, but she was afraid to do so. Later in a long letter to Eva she expressed regret at not having reported him. “I hated, hated, hated Will Marshall,” she wrote. Bertie did try to tell Mary of Will’s behaviour, but Mary lost her temper saying, “Don’t talk to me like that of my man.”
A picture taken of Bertie when she was about sixteen shows a very beautiful girl dressed in the height of fashion, a photograph taken after she had run away from an impossible situation. She went west to Idaho and then to Panama City where she speculated in a gold mine which failed, worked as a journalist, ran a picture show and a rooming house. She took the name of Mrs. Jesse Saunders, although there is no account of a marriage to a Saunders, thought to be a travelling salesman. Rumour had it that she ran a bordello. Eventually she turned up in Tampico, Mexico, where she died in poverty in 1925. Her sister, Eva Jane, visited her in 1917 and members of the family mailed money to her from time to time. Unfortunately, it seems she never received any of it as the envelopes had been slit open and the cash removed.
Near the turn of the century, Martha Amanda’s second husband died and she was once again a widow without an income. She wrote to a man she had met on the train during her honeymoon trip with Wilson, a G.A. Bayne from Victoria, British Columbia. They married in Calgary on May 12, 1909, when the bride was sixty-seven. Martha Amanda went west with him, but would soon return to Ontario. Later Bayne came east, but Martha Amanda declined to follow him out west again. After he died in 1921, Martha Amanda travelled from one daughter’s establishment to another until her death in 1930. The frail Martha Amanda, thrice widowed, lived to be 87 years of age.
Sarah and George Sutton Weir with Ethel Ruth, born 1886. The photograph taken in Tawas City in 1888.
The year following his marriage, George Sutton Weir, still on trial by the church fathers, was assigned to Alcona and Black River in the Alpena District. In 1884 he had been classed as a travelling second class deacon and assigned to Tawas City in the Alpena District. Two years later, he became the Reverend George Sutton Weir, admitted to full connection, elected and ordained deacon, and remained in the same charge. Sarah and George’s first child, Ethel Ruth, was born in their home in Black River that same year.
A riding circuit was an exhausting business as Sarah well knew from her father’s experiences. The average extent of a circuit had a preacher travelling for two weeks at a time, home on Saturday to prepare for the Sabbath and then out on his circuit again, relying on the faithful to feed and house him overnight. This was a lonely time for Sarah, far from her relatives and home, and with a little baby to care for as well.
In 1888 George was elected and ordained elder at the Conference held in Detroit from September 12 to 18. His Tawas City appointment was renewed, which must have come as a happy relief to Sarah, for her son, George Harrison, was born there that same year. The following year the little family was uprooted and sent to Laingsburg in the Saginaw District.
It was while he was stationed in Tawas City, now a resort area on Lake Huron, and ministering to the communities on his circuit situated on water courses emptying into the lake, that George contracted malaria and became very ill. Many struggling hamlets were subjected to epidemics of malaria from the mosquitoes in the swampy surroundings and some were completely depopulated. While Sarah and her babies seem to have escaped, George’s health was seriously impaired. Desperate to try anything to restore his well being, he took courses in popular new alternatives to traditional medicine, appealing, if not widely understood or researched. He obtained an M.E. Diploma as Master of Electro Therapeutics from the National College of Electro Therapeutics in Lima, Ohio, and a Ph.G degree from the Ohio Institute of Pharmacy in Columbus, Ohio, the latter institution being on the Homeopathic Register. There is no record of George travelling to Ohio, so it must be assumed that these were mail order degrees. Apparently these studies did not help to improve his health.
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