TOZER, S. EUNICE (IVES) (17??-1844)

TOZER, S. EUNICE (IVES), churchwoman; b. New England; m. Jared Tozer Sr; d. South Esk, 1844.

By tradition, Eunice Ives was a daughter of Capt. David Ives, a Connecticut Loyalist who came to New Brunswick with his wife and children in 1783. She did not accompany the Ives family to the province, however, but remained in New England and married Jared Tozer Sr, a native of Lyme, Conn., who had served with Washington's troops in the Revolutionary War. About 1789 she and her husband and their two young sons moved to New Brunswick, settling first in Sunbury County, and around 1811 on the south side of the Northwest Miramichi.

The Baptist minister Robert Emmerson credited his "eminently pious grandmother," Eunice Ives, with having played a large part in his personal religious development, and her direct and indirect role in the establishment of the Baptist tradition on the Miramichi was no less considerable. When the first Miramichi Baptist church was formed in North Esk parish in 1819 she was one of the eleven charter members, as were three of her sons, a son-in-law, and a daughter-in-law. In 1826 her son James Tozer became the first Miramichi resident to be ordained a Baptist minister.

Eunice Ives and her husband had eleven children who lived to adulthood, and they are the ancestors of thousands of persons of Miramichi origin, including all persons surnamed Tozer, Emmerson, Somers, Silliker, and Mutch.