MACDONALD, FINLAY ROBERT (1843-1901)

MACDONALD, FINLAY ROBERT, Presbyterian minister, Newcastle, 1869-73; b. Sunny Brae, Pictou Co., N.S., 13 Oct 1843, s/o Duncan MacDonald and Christina Cameron; m. 1870, Agnes Jaffray Marshall, of Househill, near Glasgow, Scotland; d. Coupar-Angus, Perthshire, Scotland, 22 Nov 1901.

Finlay R. MacDonald was a grandson of Alexander MacDonald, who arrived in Pictou County from Glen Urquhart, Scotland, in 1803. He grew up in Pictou County and was one of a number of British North American students chosen by the colonial committee of the Church of Scotland to be educated overseas. He attended the University of Glasgow under church auspices and was licensed by the Presbytery of Ayr.

After a brief term of service in Scotland, MacDonald returned to Canada in 1869. He was to have been an assistant at St Paul's Church in Fredericton, but he was soon called to St James in Newcastle, where the pulpit had been vacant since the death of the Rev. William Henderson in the summer of 1868. In 1870 his fiancée also came to Canada from Scotland, and they were married in Halifax.

MacDonald's pastorate was said to have been "an unbroken success," but he announced early in 1873 that he was experiencing health problems and would be returning to the more agreeable climate of Scotland. He was the minister of Martyrs Church in Paisley from 1874 to 1881 and then of the church at Coupar-Angus. He visited the Miramichi and his former home in Nova Scotia in 1883 and again in 1893. He was in his fifty-ninth year at the time of his death in 1901.