BURGE, WILLIAM ALBERT (1872-1946)

BURGE, WILLIAM ALBERT, United Church minister, Red Bank and Whitneyville, 1938-40; b. Somerset Co., England, 14 Nov 1872, s/o Thomas Burge and Mary Webber; m. 1902, Jane McRonald Roy, in Winnipeg; d. Halifax, N.S., 4 Apr 1946.

William A. Burge made his way to Canada in 1893 and joined his brother in farming in Saskatchewan. He became a lay preacher there and later studied theology at St Stephen's College in Edmonton. Ordained in 1919, at age forty-seven, he ministered in rural Saskatchewan for the Presbyterian and United Churches until 1929. He then accepted a call to Dominion, near Sydney, N.S. In 1933 he moved to Gibson, N.B., where he spent five years. In 1938 he accepted the two-point charge of Red Bank and Whitneyville, as successor to the Rev. Albert T. King. He stayed two years and then left for Bermuda, where he took up the last charge of his ministry. He retired at Fairview, N.S., in 1944.

Burge had "a great love for flowers and found pleasure in growing them and sharing them with others." When he died in 1946, at age seventy-three, his named survivors were his wife, two sons, and two daughters.