Isabelle McTavish - Canadian Missionary Doctor - 1881-1953: Canadian Genealogy Carnival, Edition 2

Isabelle MCTAVISH,

b. 19 December, 1881 Minnedosa, Manitoba, Canada;

d. 26 January, 1953, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

This post is for the Second Edition of the Canadian Genealogy Carnival - "My Famous Canadian Ancestor".

Was your ancestor a famous Canadian hockey player, actor or politician? Tell us about famous Canadians in your family. Don't have a famous Canadian ancestor in your family tree? Not to worry; choose a famous Canadian you admire and share why you would like to have this person as your ancestor.

I have NO famous ancestors at all, and no famous connections either (unless we count the old story about being related to Mary, Queen of Scots, and I don't!), but there are a number of family connections to Canadians who should at least be better known, in my opinion.

One of those is Isabelle McTavish, a Canadian medical missionary to China. I heard about her when I was young, since she lived in Newdale, Manitoba, where my grandmother and mum were both born. I was always interested in her since I was told she became a doctor in the 1910's, which was certainly uncommon at the time, spent much of her life in China, and never married.

Isabelle MCTAVISH, b. 19 December, 1881, Minnedosa area, Manitoba, Canada; d. 26 January, 1953, Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Parents: John MCTAVISH (1847-1891) and Catherine Jane WADDELL (1856-1936), married at Perth, Ontario, Canada, 29 May, 1878.

Isabelle McTavish's siblings: John Fraser, James Andrew, Annie (married Thomas Andrew WADDELL).

Although Isabelle McTavish was born near Minnedosa, Manitoba, Canada in 1881, sometime before 1891, her family moved to Newdale, Manitoba. Her father, a farmer and entrepreneur, taught school at Newdale, but died at work in 1891.

Life must have been difficult for the family. But in 1915, Isabelle Mctavish was graduated as a doctor from the Manitoba Medical College in Winnipeg. Canada. She and Frances Gertrude McGill, also from Minnedosa area, that year were the third and fourth women to be so graduated, following Dr. Edith Ross in 1913 and Dr. Lavinia McPhee Green, the very first to be graduated. Dr. Green hosted a dinner at Winnipeg's Royal Alexandra Hotel for the four female doctors the evening after the graduation. (Manitoba Free Press, 15 May, 1915, p. 9)

That fall, Isabelle McTavish left for China to work as a medical missionary with the Presbyterian Church of Canada. Until 1942, with brief periods away, she continued to work as a doctor in China – in North Honan, at Wuan, Wheihwei, and at Changte (at first with Doctor Jean Gow). According to McTavish's obituary, the Chinese government honoured her for this. (Winnipeg Free Press, 26 January, 1953, p.9.) The Newdale 1870-1970 history mentions that this honour was the ‘Order of Mercy Decoration Medal, 2nd Degree’. (Printed at Brandon: Newdale Historical Society, 1970, pp. 146-7)

McTavish apparently returned home in 1927 during the period of civil war. My mother remembered her speaking in Newdale to raise money for missionary work. (I'm sure this is how my mother first realized how wide the world was outside Newdale. My mum was fascinated with China all her life. I'm glad she did get to travel there at last.)

McTavish didn’t practice locally as a doctor as far as I know, but my mother said she did attend my great grandmother when she was dying at home, as the Newdale doctor was out of town.

McTavish returned to China in 1931. During World War II, she and others were taken prisoner and interned; she was freed and returned home in 1942 with other missionaries. The Lethbridge Herald of 25 June, 1942, p.9, reported her among those who had left Shanghai on a repatriation ship for Portuguese West Africa.

From 1942 to 1946, she served at the Bonnyville General Hospital in Alberta, Canada (Katherine K. Prettie Hospital), long a project of the Women’s Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church of Canada and later of the United Church of Canada. In 1946, she returned to China to help re-open the hospital at Changte. She left China for the last time in 1949 and returned to Newdale, Manitoba, but very soon moved to Winnipeg. She continued to speak, usually to women’s groups, on missionary and medical work in China, and attended conferences, for instance, a Methodist Missionary conference in New York in 1943.

On the 26th of January, 1953, she died in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She was buried in Newdale in the McTavish family plot. (North side, Newdale’s ‘Oldale’ Cemetery.) Both her brothers and her sister survived her.

Recently there has been more interest in the work of Canadian women and others in medical missions in China, see for example, Healing Henan: Canadian Nurses at the North China Mission, 1888-1947 by Sonya Grypma (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008) and In War and Famine: Missionaries in China's Honan Province in the 1940s by Erleen Christensen (Montreal, Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005).

So far, there are only brief mentions of Doctor Isabelle McTavish though. I hope in 2009-2010 to write a research piece about her myself.

I'd be interested in learning more about the other women connected with Isabelle McTavish's life, particularly Dr. Lavinia McPhee Green, who I believe has a British Columbian connection.

Here I've used the contemporary newspaper renditions of Chinese place names.