First

After a lengthy break, I’m returning to my blog although active research is still on hold for the foreseeable future. I’ve decided to attempt Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge in 2019! I can’t guarantee that I’ll have an entry each week, but hopefully I can get most of them.

Week 1’s challenge is simply titled “First”, so I thought about various firsts in my family and decided to write about the first known university graduate in my family. I remember when I initially found about the first graduate that I was surprised and pleased to discover it was a woman. In writing this, I realized that I actually know very little about her, often my knowledge is tangentially-related through her husband or other family members.

My 2x great-aunt Charlotte Elsie Hitcham, who was called Lottie, was the seventh of ten children born to Robert Hitcham and Mary Ann Fewster. She was born in Whitby, Yorkshire, England on 11 August 1878. Robert was a Master Mariner, Freemason, and a minister on the Wesleyan Methodist circuit until his unexpected death in 1894, while Mary Ann stayed home and raised the children.

Lottie and her siblings grew up financially well-off thanks to their father’s job, and it would seem that they were fairly progressive for the time, since at least a couple of the daughters worked in shops prior to marriage. I haven’t yet discovered whether Lottie held such a job, but she is the only one of her sisters, to my knowledge, who attended university.

Charlotte Elsie Hitcham, Leeds University Graduate 1905

Information I have found indicates that Lottie graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Leeds University in 1905. She soon landed a teaching job at the Methodist College (Holloway School) in St. John’s, Newfoundland, then moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in 1909 where she met her future husband, Dr. William Alva Gifford, a Doctor of Divinity. They were married in Cambridge, Massachussetts in 1913 while he attended Harvard University. The couple settled in Montreal, Quebec by 1915 where he was a professor at McGill University.

The 1921 census indicates that Lottie’s occupation was “None”, so it seems that she perhaps stayed home with the children, at least until they attended school in England. More recent census records have not yet been released.  I have no additional records of any kind to indicate what she may have been up to until her death, and Google searches pull up hits for her husband and children, but only mention Lottie in passing. Perhaps she returned to teaching, perhaps she stayed home, I really don’t know.

From my grandmother, Lottie’s niece, I know that Lottie died of cancer 29 July 1949 in Montreal at the age of 70. She raised two children who both went on to become academics, so clearly education was an important part of her life, and their lives.

Aunt Lottie must have been a strong woman to attend – and graduate from – university at a time when women didn’t generally obtain post-secondary education. She must have also been quite independent to move overseas to Newfoundland and then to British Columbia by herself as a young woman. It’s a privilege to call her my family.