Ward, Edmund

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: George L. Parker, “WARD, EDMUND,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 8, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ward_edmund_8E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Printer, newspaperman, author, office holder, and publisher’s agent; b. 24 June 1787 in Halifax, son of Edmund Ward and Hannah Rogers; m. there 9 Nov. 1817 Eleanor Bowers Jackson, and they had five sons and two daughters; d. 31 Oct. 1853 in Hamilton, Bermuda.
    • Edmund Ward’s father, a loyalist from Connecticut, met his wife while he was a prisoner in her father’s home during the American Revolutionary War; Captain Ward later served as an official in the barracks department in Nova Scotia, where he received land grants after the war. Young Edmund was trained as a printer in the office of William Minns. In 1809 the governor of Bermuda, Brigadier-General John Hodgson, invited him there to edit a newspaper, which became the Royal Gazette. In Bermuda, Ward also issued the Gleaner, a short-lived literary paper, and the Weekly Gazette.
    • Ward’s other publications included the Nova-Scotia almanack, The farmer’s almanack, Ward’s almanack, and one issue of the British North American Magazine, and Colonial Journal. Elected secretary of the Halifax Temperance Society in 1834, that May he began the Temperance Recorder to bring together the 10,000 persons in some 90 temperance societies around the province whom he hoped to attract with a low subscription rate. 
    • Little is known about the years Ward then spent in New York City before he went to Hamilton, Bermuda, in October 1853 to assist his son Robert, the editor of the Bermuda Herald, who had contracted yellow fever. Ward himself came down with the fever and died suddenly. He was buried in the parish of Pembroke. Although quarrelsome and vindictive in public, Ward was remembered with affection by his children. A good parliamentary reporter and an advocate of temperance and other social improvements, he was a journalist with a direct, simple style.
  • Son of Proven United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=8806
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/168774015/edmund-ward