George, Henry (family)

George, Henry (family)

Henry George, 1864-1932, was born at Kirton-in-Lindsay, Lincolnshire, England, studied medicine at St. Bartholomew's, and qualified as a physician in 1887. He married Barbara Mary Bernard, 1867-1936, in 1888. They emigrated to Calgary, N.W.T., where Mary's father W. L. Bernard had begun a law practice, in 1889. Dr. George entered into a partnership with Dr. Neville Lindsay, then moved to Innisfail, N.W.T. to establish his own practice in 1893. Henry and Barbara collected First Nations artifacts, natural history specimens, and a wide variety of other items, and opened their collection to the public as the Innisfail Museum. Barbara was an amateur artist who, according to family legend, designed the Alberta coat of arms. Henry and Barbara founded the Alberta Natural History Society in 1906. They moved to Red Deer, Alberta, along with the museum, in 1907. They retired to Victoria, B.C. in 1922, and the museum artifacts became the nucleus of the Calgary Public Museum. They had eleven children who survived infancy: Henry Bernard, Charles Llewellyn, Ernest Scudamore, Desmond St. Clair, Freederick Morton, Barbara Mary Kathleen "Molly" (Macdonald), Norah Hellen (Heeney), Vivian Lizette (Gray), Henriette Caroline Alice (Day), William Godfrey Septimus, and Yule Christine Helliwell

Red Deer and District Archives