Fonds glen-729 - Cowdry family fonds

Nathaniel Harrington Cowdry, 1849-1925, born in England, and his brother John Cowdry, 1857-1947, born in Toronto, Ontario, moved from Ontario to Regina in 1882 and then to Fort Macleod, Alberta in 1886. They established the town's first bank, known as Cowdry Brothers in 1886. In 1905 the bank was sold to the Canadian Bank of Commerce, at which time Nathaniel continued in the banking business in Ontario, and John took up ranching near Pincher Creek. Nathaniel married Anna Ingham and they had one son, Edmund. In 1885 John married Emma Gaisford Whitney, 1866-1893, and they had four children, Mary Adelaide (Hanning), 1887-1942, Frederic Thomas, 1888-1888, Augustus Nathaniel, 1891-1935, and John, 1893-1893. John Cowdry's second marriage was to Annie Augusta Thompson, in 1898 and they had one daughter Augusta Edith Alice (Chamberlin), 1899-1986. The John Cowdry family subsequently moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where Augustus worked for the Dominion Machinery Company and Anglo-American Trading Company in the late 1920s and 1930s. For further information see Henry Klassen's article "Cowdry Brothers : Private Bankers in Southwestern Alberta, 1886-1905" in Alberta History. - vol. 37, no. 1 (Winter, 1989).