Dictionary of Glengarry Biography

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====== MacKinnon, Harriet Isabel ====== 
 (6 March 1920-9 July 2000), heritage worker, teacher. (Harriet MacKinnon, Harriet I. MacKinnon) Born at Stewarts Glen, northwestern GC. Parents: John Kenneth Stewart and his wife Sarah Ann Grant. John Kenneth Stewart, a farmer and carpenter, was the son of Charles Stewart and grandson of Alexander Stewart. Harriet Stewart, an only child, attended Stewarts Glen School and Maxville High School, where she completed Grade 13. She also took music lessons (organ and piano). In her working career, she did part-time teaching, also library and secretarial work at Maxville High School, then having obtained the necessary qualifications she taught home economics (homemaking) for ten years at Glengarry District High School (Alexandria) and two years at General Vanier Secondary School (Cornwall). She also taught, more briefly, at Arc Industries in Alexandria. For a considerable number of year she operated the Glengarry Book Store in Alexandria, first as its manager, and then from 1981 (//Glengarry News// 4 March 1981) as its owner. At the Dunvegan Church she was an organist for several years and at the Church on the Hill, Alexandria, for over twenty years. She was married to Wallace Alexander (“Bud”) MacKinnon of Dunvegan, but the marriage ended in divorce. (two children) Harriet MacKinnon died at the Community Nursing Home, Alexandria, the year following the death of one her sons at Ottawa. Her burial was at Dunvegan, where, as David Anderson has noted, in the southeast corner of the cemetery Harriet lies near “the museum that she did so much to establish & sustain.”

<tab>Harriet MacKinnon was one of the founders of the Glengarry Historical Society in 1962, and was one its first group of directors. She also served as president. Over a very long time, as the corresponding secretary of the society, one of her duties was editing and mailing the society’s monthly //Newsletter//. In that newsletter, she included in issue after issue most valuable notices of recent publications related to GC and its families, and gave the names of the people who were currently doing research on GC-related topics. These reports form a valuable and surprisingly detailed record of historical and genealogical inquiry, and of the dates and circumstances of the publication of books, and well deserve to be thoroughly indexed. Because she otherwise wrote little herself except newspaper articles reporting on current heritage events, posterity will have only a most inadequate idea of how much she contributed to the great expansion of knowledge of GC history in her time. She had a vast personal, or remembered, knowledge of GC history, especially in the genealogy of its families. But more importantly, she backed this knowledge up with what appeared to admiring inquirers to be a most enormous collection of historical notes and clippings and other sources.

<tab>She and Ewan Ross were almost certainly the two most active and diligent writers of letters on GC history in their time, but with the difference that whereas Ewan Ross both gave and received information, as an active writer he was understandably more interested in the latter role, while Harriet principally just helped other people with their inquiries. Harriet had a clear, organizing mind, and from her vast resources of data, in long, handwritten letters, in a handwriting that looked cramped and hurried, but was always as clearly legible as print (nobody ever needed to puzzle over a date or a spelling in Harriet’s letters), she selflessly answered inquiries from every part of North America, not to mention inquiries from elsewhere in the world.

<tab>Visitors also found her ready to give information in person at her bookshop, and at her large, white frame house towards the north end of Main Street, Alexandria. It was a part of her contribution, also, that besides maintaining a very high-quality collection of general books in her bookstore–though at one stage she observed that she was only able to keep the bookstore going because she had her pension to rely on–she also sold many local histories and genealogies from GC, and sometimes, also, more widely from SDG and the Ottawa Valley. The Alexandria post office box number 416 was Harriet’s own household number, but it was familiar to followers of the Glengarry Historical Society as the number from which she mailed the society’s correspondence. After her death it was taken over to be the box number for the society: a small memorial to her service and diligence, and one poignant it may be supposed to some of those who remember her.


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<fs small>//Glengarry News// & //VKHR// both 12 July 2000 * Campbell, Tannis, & Stewart, //MacDougalls//, 24, 64-67 (with portraits) * personal knowledge * //Bibliography of Glengarry//: index * obituary of her son, Kenneth W. MacKinnon, //GN// 10 Feb. 1999 * GHS, //Newsletter//, Nov. 2000 * honoured by GHS at dinner, //GN// 12 Oct. 1983 (valuable, with portrait and notice of tributes) * photograph of as child, in farm scene along Scotch River, //VKHR// 19 Jan. 1994
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