MORRISON, FRANCIS ROBERT WARD (1853-1893)

MORRISON, FRANCIS ROBERT WARD, banker; b. Huntly, Scotland, 20 Apr 1853, s/o James Morrison and Catherine Saunders; m. 1st, 1879, Isabella Knight McKay, d/o Neil McKay and Dolina McKay, and 2nd, 1886, Mary Jane MacLaggan, d/o Charles R. MacLaggan and Charlotte Mountain, of Blackville; d. Newcastle, 3 Mar 1893.

Francis R. W. Morrison was with the Merchants Bank in Prince Edward Island during 1879/80. He was then with the Moncton branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia for a brief period, before being assigned, in May 1881 as the first agent for the BNS at Newcastle. In December he became agent as well for a branch which was opened in Chatham. His return to the Newcastle branch, following a period in which Mr D. Waters was agent, was announced in 1885. In 1888 he replaced Frank Kennedy as agent at Chatham. At this time he was again designated as agent for both the Newcastle and Chatham branches, and he was still acting as such at the time of his death five years later. He was "exceedingly popular" with customers of the bank having, in the words of the Miramichi Advance, "the happy facility of accepting or rejecting offered business with equal affability."

Morrison's first wife, Isabella K. McKay, died in 1882, at age twenty-four, and his second wife, Mary Jane MacLaggan, in 1890, at age twenty-eight. He was not quite forty at the time of his death, which occurred at the home of Charles S. Ramsay in Newcastle, where he was a boarder. He was survived by a son and a daughter of his first marriage and by a six-year-old son, Huntly Morrison, who also became a banker.