Banner: City Mission women early 1930s. Back: L to R: Annie Srigley, Martha Doner, Edith Raymer, unknown, unknown, Front: Rosie Sargeant, unknown, unknown, Annie Yeo, unknown, Winnie Barfoot?

From a reader-friendly-blog point of view, I am going to do something crazy. I am here going to list the names, and if known, years of birth and death, entry to recognized public ministry and place of origin of all the 133 women in the records of the early EMCC (Mennonite Brethren in Christ) in Ontario from 1885 to 1946 who were not missionaries solely. My WordPress version can’t handle my LibreOffice chart I see. Sorry.

This list will be similar to but lightly corrects and adds to the Ontario portion of Jason C Garnaat’s 1995 pioneering list in Reflections.¹ I would like to include the places and times they served, husband’s names, if any, etc, but that would make the list too unwieldy. This information is compiled from Ontario Conference Journals, some local church histories, but also some online genealogy sites, and may have errors.

You will quickly see the gaps in basic information in a chart like this, begging for further research. I have information on women who were hired by a local congregation as “deaconesses”(2) or even called city mission workers after the official society concluded in 1946, but are remembered as workers in the reckoning of the churches. There are also women who volunteered as evangelists at protracted meetings (“revivals”) yet never enrolled formally in the Conference program. I would like to honour them in a separate EMCC History Blog.(3) I do not know what happened to the records of the City Mission Workers Society of Ontario. I am convinced there were some; they had a president and a secretary. If they are lost, it is a big loss.

There were a few women who joined the Ontario Society from other MBiC Conferences, such as Irene Plumb from Michigan, and A May Marker who came from the USA and returned there and may have been counted in those Conferences’ statistics. Gladys Eby came from the Canada Northwest Conference, and a half dozen from Ontario went west, so there is a small overlap of numbers. These are noted in the chart.

Anyone with more certain information, corrections or even clues, please help with this project.

(“PK” is informal for “Preacher’s Kid,” people who moved many times.)

1Jason C Garnaat, “In Memory of Her: A List of Over 500 Women in North American Ministries in the Missionary Church and Its Predecessors,” Reflections (Fall 1995) p 4-9.

2 See forthcoming EMCC History Blog: “Comments on ‘Deaconess’”

3 See EMCC History Blog: “Uncredentialed”