Bingham, Elizabeth (Young)

  • Jennifer S. H. Brown, “BINGHAM, ELIZABETH (Young),” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 16, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/bingham_elizabeth_16E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Lay Methodist missionary and author; b. 10 April 1843 in Bradford, Upper Canada, eldest child of Joseph Bingham, a tanner and bootmaker, and Clarissa Vanderburgh, of New York loyalist descent; m. 25 Dec. 1867 Egerton Ryerson Young in Toronto, and they had eight children, of whom three died in infancy; d. there 29 May 1934.
    • In late 1867 Elizabeth married Egerton Ryerson Young, with whom she had begun a childhood romance when his father served as minister of their church from 1853 to 1855. She joined her husband in Hamilton, where he had recently been ordained as a minister and assigned to that city’s First Methodist Church, but they would not stay there long.
    • Early in 1868 the Wesleyan Methodist Church in the new province of Ontario was organizing an expedition under George Millward McDougall and George Young to provide new staff for the missions that James Evans, Robert Terrill Rundle, and others had established in Rupert’s Land in 1840. Less than a month after the Youngs’ marriage the superintendent of missions, Enoch Wood, asked them to join the group, which included the Reverend Peter Campbell and his family. The young couple accepted, and the party left in May.
    • Following two months and 19 days of travelling by ship and train to St Paul, Minn., by Red River cart northward, and then by York boat the length of Lake Winnipeg, the Youngs reached the Rossville mission near Norway House (Man.) on 29 July 1868.
    • In the summer of 1873 Elizabeth’s husband was asked to go on tour across Ontario with the Reverend Thomas Crosby* to raise funds for missions. While he awaited his successor and prepared for the move to Berens River (Man.), where he and Elizabeth would found a mission the next year, she set out for Ontario with their three children. They had to contend with Lake Winnipeg storms and heat during their journey south by York boat, and her ailing infant daughter, Nellie Elizabeth, died. The Cree boatmen made her a coffin, and arranged for her burial at the Indian settlement at St Peter’s.
    • Elizabeth published a two-part article in the February and March 1898 issues of the Indian’s Friend (Philadelphia) entitled “The transformed Indian woman,” which expressed a central theme in mission writing: the improvement in the quality of life of the women whose husbands had converted to Christianity and thus became, according to Elizabeth, more “gentle and sympathetic.” “To me as a woman,” she later wrote, “one of the most delightful phases of our work was to see the gradual uplifting and increased happiness of our Indian Sisters.” She was remembered at her death, at the age of 91, for her character and spirit, and as the last surviving member of the band of Methodist missionaries who had set out for the northwest in 1868.
  • Great Granddaughter of Proven United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=8671
  • Find A Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/63593875/elizabeth-young