CARMAN, RICHARD (1809-1896)

CARMAN, RICHARD, lawyer; b. Nova Scotia, 15 Oct 1809, s/o William Carman Sr and Ann Sharman; brother of William Carman and Henry Charles Darling Carman; m. 1835, Mary Susan Cunard Roy, a niece of Joseph and Henry Cunard; d. Winnipeg, Man., Jan 1896.

Richard Carman studied law with Thomas H. Peters and was admitted to the bar in 1832. He located in Bathurst, where his father was high sheriff, and practiced there until his father's retirement in 1850. He then moved to Toronto and started a business agency. This was evidently not successful, since within a year he and his wife and children, together with his aging parents, returned to the Miramichi. He opened a law office in Chatham and was still in business more than thirty years later. By then he was the oldest lawyer in practice in New Brunswick, and with the death of his brother William in 1885 he became the most senior of the barristers of the province.

Carman played a role in Liberal party politics and was a warden of St Paul's Anglican Church in 1881. His wife, Mary S. C. Roy, predeceased him in 1879, after which date his daughter Susan Carman was his housekeeper. In 1888 he and his daughter moved to Winnipeg to live with his son James Carman, who was a post office employee. Francis E. Winslow solicited financial support for him in 1895, stating that he was "living in great poverty in Winnipeg." Word of his death, at age eighty-six, was received in New Brunswick in January 1896. There were at least eight children in the family, not all of whom lived to maturity.