QUAY 3 At ten o'clock in the morning on the 60th birthday of her country, the oldest resident of Canada, whose age was twice that of the Confederated Union, passed away quietly at her home at 4 Askin Boulevard, Sandwich.
Mrs. Margaret McRae, 108 years of age, was born in Nova Scotia in the days when the word "Canada" meant to a Nova Scotian the equivalent of a foreign country...
Mrs. McRae was born on the 17th of January, 1819, in the beautiful Valley of the Margaree? on Cape Breton Island. The rumbles of the Napoleanic Wars were still in the air and veterans of the War of 1812 were as common as veterans of the Great War today. Brock's memory was a matter of yesterday and the blood of the Tecumseh was scarcely dry upon the ground at Moraviantown, in the district where this child, born in Cape Breton, was to die 108 years later. On the very day, and almost at the very hour of her death, speakers in the town of Sandwich were addressing Justice day crowds from the porch of a mansion which had been Brock's headquarters in the War of 1812, a few years prior to her birth more than a century before.
Mrs. McRae was taken by her parents, as a child, to Three Rivers, Quebec. Later the family moved to "Upper Canada", landing at Wolfe Island, near Kingston, Ontario. As she reached maturity, Mrs. McRae moved to Victoria County, where the greater part of her life was to be spent. Her father was a farmer and pioneer school teacher of the early days of the country.
Mrs. McRae was the mother of 12 children. of whom only two are now living. She spent the last years of her life in the home of her son, J. L. McRae, 4 Askin boulevard, Sandwich. One other son, William, of Detroit, still survives of her large family. The body will be taken on Monday to Mount Pleasant, Michigan for internment...
