Page 189 - Fortier Family History

Children of James D. Lamb & Mary Finlayson Lamb It was not just for her charitable work that Mary Finlayson Lamb might be remembered. She and James were the parents of nine children that survived infancy, and a number of whom led lives embedded in the filaments of imperial and transnational networks of trade and migration in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Four of the Lamb children remained in Nairn. Anne married Donald Michael, a solicitor and notary public, while James married and worked as a solicitor and bank agent in town, and was active in the Nairnshire Farming Society, the Town Council, and the Nairn Parish Church. Other children moved beyond Scotland however. Elizabeth Lamb married John Shearer Middelton, a tea planter and landowner in Mysore; her brother Alexander James, who managed a tea plantation of over 1000 acres, died in Assam, two years before his mother’s death. In 1916 Lamb’s seventh child, Roderick, took passage on the Tuscania, sailing from Liverpool on a voyage that would take him to New York, then Honolulu, and finally, Fanning Island (Tabuaeran). While we can’t know whether her children’s movements around the empire and globe caused her concern or, on the other hand, appeared quite natural to someone with her history of mobility, the fate of her youngest child might well have caused Mary great heartache. In 1901 John William Lamb, a law clerk, was certified as a patient in the James Murray Royal Asylum for Lunatics in Perth. Sixteen years later he was killed in action in the first World War, fighting with a Canadian regiment. Mary Finlayson Lamb’s obituary described her as having been born in Canada, with a father employed in the fur trade. While “Mrs lamb...will be much missed in the community, and her memory will long be cherished and revered by all who knew her,” to her social circle her legacy would not be, it seems, that of a Cree-Scottish woman. The Lamb Family, circa 1870s. Mary Finlayson Lamb is seated center, holding one of her sons.