Biography of Pickering-Thomson, Mary Louise, 1879-1967 : Digital Resources on Manitoba History

Biography of Pickering-Thomson, Mary Louise, 1879-1967

Mary Louise Pickering Thomson was born on August 14, 1879, in Brantford Ontario and came to Portage La Prairie in 1882 with her parents, Joseph and Martha Pickering. Joseph Pickering was a carpenter and he went to work for the Manitoba and North Western Railway and later for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Mary, known to her family and friends as Mamie, became a teacher at a very early age, receiving a non-professional teaching certificate in 1895. Not all of her teaching experiences were happy ones and she decided to leave the profession in 1899. That same year, on December 19, she married George Fisher Thomson, who was ten years older than she was. George, who had come from Galt, Ontario, in 1878, was a farmer who lived at Portage Plains, just north of Portage La Prairie. He was a widower and had a three-year-old son. Mamie now left her old life behind to become a farmer’s wife. She and George had two daughters and three sons. George died in 1922. Mamie died on August 3, 1967, only two years shy of her 90th birthday.

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