Moodie, Geraldine (family)

Family

Moodie, Geraldine (family)

• Moodie, John Douglas

1849-1947

Geraldine Moodie, nee Fitzgibbon, 1854-1945, was born in Toronto, Ontario. She was the granddaughter on her mother's side of author Susanna Moodie and on her father's side of 1812 war hero James FitzGibbon. Her mother, Agnes Dunbar Fitzgibbon (later Chamberlin) was a botanical artist. Geraldine was western Canada's first professional woman photographer, and she ran studios in Battleford (1891-1896) and Maple Creek (1896-1900), with a branch in Medicine Hat.

John Douglas Moodie, 1849-1947, was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He and Geraldine married in 1878 in England, and returned to Canada the following year. Douglas (as he was called) joined the North-West Mounted Police in 1885 and had a long career with the force, retiring in 1917. In 1897-1898 he led a NWMP patrol overland from Edmonton, Alberta to the Yukon goldfields. In 1903-1904 he was part of the Canadian government's S.S. "Neptune" expedition to Hudson Bay. There he established a NWMP detachment at Fullerton Harbour, to prevent lawlessness, to collect customs duties from foreign whalers and fur traders, and to assert Canadian sovereignty in the region. In 1904-1905 he was put in charge of the government's S.S. "Arctic" expedition which wintered again at Fullerton.

Geraldine accompanied her husband on the "Arctic" expedition. She set up a studio in the police detachment house and took many of the portraits of Inuit for which she is well known. At the same time, her husband, an amateur photographer, took extensive outdoor photos of Mounted Police activities. Douglas Moodie was subsequently in charge of the Churchill detachment of the Royal North-West Mounted Police (1906-1909), and of the Dawson City, Yukon detachment (1912-1915), and Geraldine accompanied him on both of these postings. In 1910 he escorted Governor General Earl Grey on a canoe trip from Winnipeg to Churchill. In their retirement the Moodies lived in the Cypress Hills, Duncan, British Columbia, and Calgary, Alberta. For further information see Donny White's biography, In Search of Geraldine Moodie / Regina : Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1998.

The Moodies had six children, Melville Mary (Simpkin), 1879-1970, Douglas Gerald (known as Gerald) (1880-1954), George Malcolm (1882-1895), Alex Dunbar (1884-1962), Alan Macaulay, 1886-1955), and Charles Douglas (1888-1972). Their granddaughter Anne Geraldine Augusta Moodie (1911-1995) married Frederick Perceval (1914-2001), the Earl of Egmont, in 1932. The Percevals ranched south of Calgary.

Glenbow Archives

Final

Record added by Glenbow Archives, November 24, 2015.

• English