WATERTON, HENRY (1877-1938)

WATERTON, HENRY, Anglican missionary, Ludlow and Blissfield, 1912-16; b. Doncaster, England, 8 Dec 1877, s/o Richard Waterton and Catherine Grant; m. 1916, Zaida Mabel Hinton, d/o George Hiram Hinton and Elizabeth Swim, of Blissfield parish; living in 1938.

The son of a Yorkshire grocer, Henry Waterton was trained at St Aidan's Theological College in Birkenhead, England. He was thirty-four years old in September 1912, when he was ordained a deacon of the Anglican church by the bishop of Fredericton. Early in October he took up residence at Doaktown as missionary for the parishes of Ludlow and Blissfield. There were four churches in the mission, the oldest of which, St James the Greater Church at Ludlow, had been consecrated in 1888. The others were St Andrew's at Doaktown, St Peter's at Boiestown, and St John's at Carroll's Crossing. There was also an "O'Donnell's Mission Room." The district had been served as a mission of Kingsclear on a monthly basis by the Rev. Henry Montgomery during the fifteen years prior to 1903, and since that time through makeshift arrangements, including the use of summer appointees.

Soon after his arrival, Waterton visited all parts of the mission field and spoke with church members. St Andrew's Church had been consecrated at Doaktown in 1892, but he found Anglicanism to be "weak" there, and the rectory so little used that many thought it should be sold. It was "now or never," he stated, for the denomination at Boiestown, where the little St Peter's Church had stood unfinished for many years and where only twenty-one adherents remained.

Waterton succeeded in having St Peter's officially opened on 9 July 1913 and in building an interest in the church throughout the mission. In 1914, he was ordained a priest. In a 1916 report, he stated that he had performed 172 baptisms, twenty marriages, and sixteen burials in the Upper Miramichi district. The report was submitted from Kingston, in Kings County, however, where he had been appointed rector in February 1916.

In January 1919, Waterton's youthful wife of only thirty months, Zaida M. Hinton, fell victim to the influenza epidemic. In 1923 he resigned at Kingston to return to England as curate at Goole, in Yorkshire. He had at least four subsequent appointments in Yorkshire. He was the vicar at West Witton in that county in 1938, but nothing more is known.