Martin Franklin "Frank" Dunham^[1]

1882 - 1949  (66 years)

• Name	Martin Franklin "Frank" Dunham
  Born	9 Oct 1882	Harriston, Wellington Co., Ontario, Canada   [2, 3, 4]
  Gender	Male
  Interesting	newspaper
  Name	Frank Dunham
  Occupation	bond broker
  Occupation	newspaper editor
  Residence	1891	Kitchener, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada   [3]
  	Methodist
  Occupation	1901	Kitchener, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada
  	P. S. Teacher
  Occupation	1911	Camrose, , Alberta, Canada   [5]
  	journalist
  Eby ID Number	00031-2766.3
  Died	Feb 1949  [4]
  Buried	Victoria Lawn Cemetery, St. Catharines, Lincoln Co., Ontario   [4]
  Person ID	I32645	Generations
  Last Modified	6 Apr 2024

  
  

  Father	Martin Dunham,   b. 30 Jun 1855, East Gwillimbury, Simcoe Co., Ontario ,   d. 3 Jun 1920, Kitchener, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada  (Age 64 years)
  Mother	Magdelena "Maggie" Eby,   b. 19 Apr 1851, Kitchener, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada ,   d. 7 Feb 1929, Kitchener, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada  (Age 77 years)
  Married	10 Jun 1880  [1, 3, 6]
  Family ID	F5329	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Edith Lillian Sauder,   b. 9 Jul 1884, , Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada ,   d. 1955  (Age 70 years)
  Married	15 Nov 1911	Kitchener, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada   [5]
  Last Modified	7 Apr 2024
  Family ID	F62334	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

• Photos

  Frank Dunham Frank at a time when he was a school teacher. submitted by Marion Roes.

  
  

• Notes

  FORMER KITCHENER MAN IS HURT A former Kitchener resident, Mr. Frank Dunham, brother of Miss B. Mabel Dunham, librarian, suffered a broken arm recently in a fall near his home in St. Catharines. Waterloo Chronicle 9 Jun 1932, p. 1 ___________________ Edith Lillian Sander a daughter of the merchant Soloman Sander, lived in Berlin, Ontario. In 1906 she traveled to Chicago, USA to study music and painting. She returned to Berlin in 1908 and became a soprano soloist in a local church choir. She met Martin Frank Dunham in 1904 in Berlin, Ontario and courted him until 1911 when they were married on November 15. They returned to Camrose, Alberta where Martin had been living and together they had two children, Hazel Mirriam, born November 14, 1912 and Mary Frances, born March 1914. The family moved back to Ontario at the outbreak of World War I. Edith Lillian Dunham died in 1955, pre-deceased by her husband Frank who died in 1948. Martin Frank Dunham was born on October 9, 1882 in Harriston, Ontario to Martin Squier Dunham and Magdalena Eby. Martin Squier Dunham's family were United Empire Loyalists who came to Canada from the United States in 1783 to settle first in Parr Town, New Brunswick, and later Ontario, first in Newmarket, then Harriston. Magdalena Eby's family was of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction who had settled in Berlin, Ontario, now Kitchener. Frank Dunham studied at Normal School then taught in Berlin during the years 1902-1904. He spent the summer of 1904 in the south of England engaged in Stereotype photography and returned to Ontario in the fall to attended the University of Toronto. He spent the summer of 1905 in England again engaged in Stereoscope photography, this time in northern England and the Lake District, and then returned to the University of Toronto in the fall of 1905. Dunham graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Literature and worked for a year at the "Toronto Daily Star" newspaper. In the spring of 1908 he moved to Edmonton, Alberta to serve as the commercial editor for the "Edmonton Bulletin" and in 1909 he became the news editor for the new Edmonton daily "The Capital". He was also responsible for a weekly farm paper, "The Alberta Homestead", and a weekly city paper, "The Saturday News". By 1910 Dunham was working as editor of the new "Camrose Canadian" and "Camrose Bulletin" for George P. Smith, and in the spring of 1911 he worked with Smith on Smith's campaign in the election called by the Liberals for the fall. Very soon after the election Dunham traveled to Ontario and married Edith Lillian Sander, whom he met in Berlin, Ontario and courted for seven years, and they returned to live in Camrose, Alberta. Together they had two children, Hazel Mirriam and Mary Frances. At the outbreak of World War I the Dunham family moved back to Berlin, Ontario and Frank Dunham obtained a position with the "Stratford Beacon Herald" Dunham died in St. Catherines, Ontario in 1948, survived by his wife Edith, who died in 1955. "Sander, Edith Lillian - Alberta On Record". Albertaonrecord.Ca, 2022, https://albertaonrecord.ca/sander-edith-lillian. Accessed 29 Oct 2022. ___________ ....Martin Frank Dunham was nearly twenty years older than Cavanaugh and an immigrant to the West, yet the two had much in common. Born in Ontario in 1882 into a family of devout farmers, Frank signed the pledge not to drink or smoke at the age of eighteen, and as a young man in Edmonton he occasionally felt hampered by his inability to dance. Nevertheless, his religious upbringing brought him comfort and imbued him with a strong sense of morality. Although he irregularly attended church in Edmonton and later Camrose, he enjoyed himself at Methodist socials which echoed his life in Ontario. In the West, however, he broke his pledge, regularly smoking cigars and occasionally taking a drink.[14] Frank apparently had no desire to be a farmer. He attended Normal School, for two years taught in Berlin (the town name was changed to Kitchener during World War I), and in 1904 was accepted at the University of Toronto. In order to earn money for school he spent two summers in England selling stereoscopic views. In 1904 he also met Edith Lillian Sander, daughter of Solomon Sander, a successful Berlin merchant. They began corresponding when Frank went to England in the summer of 1904. In 1907 Frank graduated from the university and started work as a reporter for the Toronto Daily Star. A year later he headed west having accepted ajob on the Edmonton Bulletin, founded by Frank Oliver to promote regional agriculture. In route he stopped in Chicago where Edith was studying music and painting and presented her with an engagement ring. Frank was twenty-six when he arrived in Edmonton, and ready to take advantage of any opportunities the West offered him. Edmonton was a bustling prairie city. Originating as a Hudson's Bay Company fort, Edmonton had boomed as a launching point for the Klondike gold rush in 1897\endash 98. In 1906 Edmonton became the capital of the recently formed province of Alberta. By 1908 the city had over eighteen thousand residents and Strathcona, the community situated on the bluffs across the North Saskatchewan River, another forty-five hundred. It was a market city, with grain elevators, flour mills, lumber- and brickyards, a pork packing plant, and the commercial businesses necessary to support a regional economy of coal mining and agriculture.[15] Frank Dunham was an unadulterated optimist. On his first day in Edmonton he wrote to Edith that he was "simply delighted with the West. To come out here is the best move I ever made and after being here only one day I can almost say that I never want to live East again." For all the time he remained in the West he never changed that point of view. Time after time, he told Edith that the West was a land of opportunity, a great country, a place where an ambitious and hard-working man could make his fortune: "The longer I live out West the more hope I have in this country and the brighter I see my chances for success. I have some big schemes in my mind at the present time, which I must not mention further, but which will mean great things somewhere in the future if I can carry them out." When a visitor from the East reminded him of the West's lack of music, culture, and art, he momentarily regretted the possibilities of the life he had abandoned in Toronto. Nevertheless, he was ever optimistic that these amenities would soon arrive in Edmonton. He agreed with his visitor that westerners seemed to think of very little but "the race for wealth," but he was content to be one of them, "to remain in the west where a great country is being built up and where I feel that I am sort of getting in on the ground floor.[16] Frank chronicled with personal satisfaction the completion of a streetcar system in Edmonton, negotiations for a railroad bridge across the North Saskatchewan River, the laying of the cornerstone for the provincial legislature building, the arrival of a new steamer for outings on the river, and the performance of every visiting artist to the city\emdash all of whom received favorable reviews from him in the pages of the Bulletin. Frank was a booster. His job required him to travel throughout Alberta reporting on the state of ag- - 139 - riculture and the growth of communities. When he took charge of the Camrose Canadian in 1910, he also readily assumed the job of publicity commissioner for the town and produced an immigration bulletin designed to lure settlers to the area. Newspaper reporting was hardly the most lucrative of jobs; although Frank made steady improvements in his position, from reporter for the Bulletin to managing editor of the Canadian, he saw his real economic opportunity in real estate. He plowed all of his savings into city lots, first in Strathcona and then in Camrose. He eagerly took on the job of publicity commissioner in Camrose, figuring that when immigrants contacted him about opportunities, he would be able to sell them his land. Frank did turn a profit, but apparently never as much as he hoped. At one point he sold two lots in Strathcona and reported that had he waited a week he could have made considerably more. On the eve of his marriage he informed Edith that he was not doing as well as some, although he had improved his assets, and she need not worry about being provided for. For Frank, manhood was achieved through comradeship with his male friends ("I never aspired to be popular with the ladies but I always covet the respect and good will of my own sex"), respect earned from his boss and coworkers, and ability to provide for a wife. Frank did not become part of the cult of physicality that Anthony Rotundo describes as part of the "the Masculine Primitive," the ideal of manhood that was coalescing in the last half of the nineteenth century. Quite matter-of-factly, Frank recounted riding and walking miles across the Alberta countryside in the course of his daily work and relaxing on Sunday by skating and playing hockey. Frank loved sports and admired sportsmen, but he was not enamored of competition and drew no particular attention to his physical accomplishments. Most often he would write about skating parties, amateur hockey, and organizing baseball games and contests as part of agricultural fairs designed to boost Alberta. In 1911 Frank told Edith that he had met a man whom he would like to emulate. This was the Methodist minister, Reverend Robert Pearson, whom Frank had known in Toronto and who was now evangelizing in the West. Frank felt Pearson, by example more than by his preaching, set the model for manhood: "In his college days he was a great rugby player and has continued to be a great lover of sport while preaching the gospel. His life exemplifies the manly man, the man who knows the temptations of life and yet who instead of shunning the world mingles with the world and does what he can to make it better."[17] Frank, too, embraced his world and presented himself to Edith as a man always on the go, hard pressed to carve out time on Sunday to write to her.[18] He was always making contacts who, he assured her, would prove useful in the future, and he kept an eye out for his golden opportunity. He seemed to relish just about everything he did. But what did he think about women, about Edith, and about how she would fit into his life? Frank Dunham was a man who believed that a woman's place was in the home, the church choir, and the ladies' club. He disparaged a spinster he met as "single and fair fat and forty." One evening in 1910 he planned to go to a Methodist service where the advertised sermon was "the ideal wife." "No doubt," he wrote, "there will be a large gathering of the fair sex there to attempt to divine the reason why they have not as yet worked their charms on men." Noting an apparently large number of single women in Edmonton, he confessed he did not understand why they had come there: "They occupy positions as stenographers in business places and the government offices and cannot help but lose more and more their power of being home makers." Frank acknowledged women's struggle to meet the expenses of city life, and pitied them, but he seemed to have no understanding that perhaps women also hoped Edmonton would be their place of opportunity. In fact, Frank seemed to think that the women who came west were of dubious character. In a discussion of unsuccessful marriages, he noted, "I have seen several cases lately where young men have picked up with western girls whom they know very little and have been sorry for it, or at least I had better say that I have been heartily sorry for them." In his mind the problem was not with western men, but with western women: "the girls down East are far superior to the majority that can be found out here." Frank may only have been trying to reassure Edith that he was not attracted to any of the women he met in Edmonton, yet his comments betray a deeper uneasiness. What seemed to disturb Frank was not a migration of "unsuitable" women, but the fact that women who came west to find work or husbands, who independently and aggressively pursued their futures\emdash as he was\emdash were not behaving as he thought women should.[19] For Frank, women who did not choose a life of domesticity were deeply flawed. In one of the many letters to Edith anticipating their future together, he attested, "I know . . . that the instincts of home are strong in you and mean more to you than all the foolish vanities which so many girls are engaging their paltry brains in these days. You have a better conception of a true woman's career, Edith, than any girl I ever met, and I love you for that." He looked forward to the day when they could set up housekeeping for he believed "that the home life is the only life and that no man is truly happy and fortified against temptations until he is a married man." Frank respected Edith's good influence, her kindness, her sense of Christian duty, and her common sense. He treasured these qualities and, since he continued to postpone their wedding, he relied upon them to keep in her good graces.[20] Frank delayed their marriage because he had not yet met his standards of what he believed necessary to take a wife. Edith was at home surrounded by friends and family, who apparently kept wondering when Frank was going to come and marry her. He did not see the public side of their engagement; he interpreted friends' interest as inappropriate inquisitiveness. Frank offered Edith sympathy, but he was not about to be rushed. In the first letter in which he addressed this issue he wrote, "I have only been out of college a year and a half and in that time I do not think I have as yet a sufficiently firm grip on this old world to launch on the sea of matrimony." He summed up, "I do not feel that as yet I have made good." Frank confessed he needed more time to convince the people of Edmonton that he had "the right stuff." Again in May 1909, after accompanying a newly married friend to look for an apartment, he told Edith that he would not consider a flat a suitable home for her. Since she had been raised in a beautiful house, he would not ask her to begin life "at the bottom of the ladder." In 1909 he canceled a trip to see her in order to take a new job as city editor for a new paper, the Daily Capital, and in 1911 he delayed his scheduled departure for his wedding several times because he wanted to take advantage of situations which he believed would advance his position. Edith was disappointed, and probably angry, but she kept her anger well hidden, perhaps because the one time she expressed it, Frank's response was so unsatisfactory.[21] Only once in more than three years of correspondence did Edith reveal her ire concerning Frank's behavior. She had not heard from him in several weeks and must have expressed her displeasure strongly. Frank apologized but also patronized: "I do not blame you for feeling the way you do, but are there not other ways of curing a man of a bad habit other than giving expression to your anger? Explosions of this kind do ease one's sense of injustice I know but they really do not look well on paper. Good nature in a girl is everything." Frank postponed their marriage because he believed he had not yet proved his manhood, either to Edith or to his peers. Yet, while caught up in his own efforts to construct his identity, he found time to give Edith advice on how to hone her femininity\emdash mainly by acquiescing to his decisions.[22] Still, with a few exceptions\emdash when Frank felt Edith was pressing him to come home or write more frequently\emdash he had nothing but praise for her nature and her activities. Frank approved of Edith's participation in women's clubs and in fact hoped that when she arrived in Camrose, she would breathe some spirit into the women's clubs of that town. However, he had a limited vision of appropriate public activity and was confident she agreed: "You would make a fine militant suffragette with all your physical strength and auburn hair," he wrote in 1910, "but I know it would be useless to have anyone solicit your active interest. You know the value of the women at the fireside too well for that."[23] During the time that Frank was in Alberta, he often escorted young women to recitals, house parties, church socials. Yet he apparently always acted in the most platonic and brotherly fashion. According to his letters, Edith was the only woman whom he ever courted, and in some ways the only woman to whom he ever paid any real attention. On the eve of his departure to marry her he penned, "Believe me Edith there never at any time has been any thought in my mind but that you are the only girl I have ever met that I would want to marry. This has often had the effect of my being very independent towards women an attitude which I believe I have carried too far for my own good." Interestingly, he assumed marriage would change his attitude toward all women: "when we get together around our own fireside I must be taught to respect the wishes of yourself and women in general much more than I have done. It will take me some time to do it Edith but you will find me a willing student for I realize what a man loses by shunning too much the society of women." According to the record he left, Frank had shunned sexual activity as well as the companionship of women. In this same letter, which he used to allay any fears Edith might have about what kind of bargain she was making, he testified, "I know what you expect of me in the way of purity of life and conduct and I am glad to say Edith, that I do not expect to have to make any apology to you in this respect." (Of course, Miles may have said the same thing to Isabelle.)[24] "Over The Edge "D0e3963" ". Publishing.Cdlib.Org, 2022, https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8g5008gq;chunk.id=d0e3963;doc.view=print. Accessed 29 Oct 2022.

  
  

• Sources

  [S3] Book - Vol I A Biographical History of Waterloo Township and other townships of the county : being a history of the early settlers and their descendants, mostly all of Pennsylvania Dutch origin..., 612. [S137] Census - ON, Waterloo, Berlin - 1901, Berlin (Town/Ville) A-5 Page 17. [S1592] Census - ON, Waterloo, Berlin - 1891, Sec. 5 Page 37. [S3231] Find A Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/203880747. [S4] Vit - ON - Marriage Registration. Name: Frank Dunham Sex: Male Age: 29 Birth Year (Estimated): 1882 Occ: journalist - Camrose, Alberta Father's Name: Martin Dunham Mother's Name: Magdalene Eby Spouse's Name: Edith L Sauder Spouse's Sex: Female Spouse's Age: 27 Spouse's Birth Year (Estimated): 1884 Res: Berlin Spouse's Father's Name: Solomon Sauder Spouse's Mother's Name: Mary Ann Klippert Marriage Date: 15 Nov 1911 Marriage Place: Berlin, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada [S7] News - ON, Waterloo, Kitchener - Berliner Journal (1859-1917), June 17 1880. Martin Dunham of Harriston and Magdalena Eby of Berlin were married by Rev. Gundy. no date given

  
  

• Event Map

  Born - 9 Oct 1882 - Harriston, Wellington Co., Ontario, Canada Residence - Methodist - 1891 - Kitchener, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada Occupation - P. S. Teacher - 1901 - Kitchener, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada Occupation - journalist - 1911 - Camrose, , Alberta, Canada Married - 15 Nov 1911 - Kitchener, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada Buried - - Victoria Lawn Cemetery, St. Catharines, Lincoln Co., Ontario  = Link to Google Earth