Lorena Gill Moore

1860s

Born 13 April 1866 in Perth County, Ontario, to Richard Moore, who was from Devonshire, England, and Eliza Frances Dickenson.

1870s–1880s

Grew up in Fullarton Township. As a teenager she worked at Bill Murch's blacksmith shop in Holmesville, where she met Thomas Lobb. Married him on 21 May 1884 at Fullarton Corners.

1890s–1910s

Moved west to Vancouver with her young family in 1893 and raised a large family there. The family spent a year on a Chilliwack farm in 1910–11. In 1915 she gave her son Harry her diamond ring when he left for the war.

1920s

Settled in Rosedale in 1919, where she was a mainstay of the church Bible class and her house was full of visiting children and grandchildren.

1930s

Spent a winter in California in 1930–31. Nursed Thomas until his death in 1933, then nearly died herself before doctors found she had pernicious anemia.

1940s

In 1941 she was honored as the local grandmother with the most great-grandchildren. Died in her sleep at home in Rosedale on 26 April 1947.

Ontario Roots and a Blacksmith's Courtship

Lorena Gill Moore was born on April 13, 1866, in Perth County, Ontario, to Richard Moore, who had come from Devonshire, England, and Eliza Frances Dickenson, and grew up in Fullarton Township in a Bible Christian family. Around 1879, still in her early teens, she worked at Bill Murch's blacksmith shop in Holmesville, and while boarding in the area she met the shop's apprentice, Thomas Lobb. They married at Fullarton Corners on May 21, 1884, and made their home first at Gowrie, where Tom had his own shop, and then at Holmesville, where their growing family lived in a house that was still standing a century later.

A Family on the Move

When a depression closed Tom's shop, the family set out in late May 1893 on a five-week train journey to Vancouver, as "poor as churchmice," in their daughter Raye's words, with a hamper of food for the trip. Their first home was a single room with a potbelly stove. Within weeks Tom broke his leg, and Lorena nursed him with the help of her younger sister Adeline, who had followed her west. That first Christmas, Adeline and the four youngest children missed the last train home from a family dinner in Fairview and had to walk six miles.

Over the next quarter-century the Lobbs moved from house to house around Mount Pleasant and east Vancouver, spent a year on a farm in Chilliwack in 1910–11, and finally settled in Rosedale in 1919, while Lorena raised a large family. Faith was at the center of it. The family moved from Methodism to Advent Christianity, and she and Tom made sure the children went to Sunday school and Wednesday-night prayer meetings. On a family train trip back to Ontario in 1907, she was trying to feed young Laurie when she accidentally squirted milk across the aisle onto a man's newspaper. When her son Harry left for the First World War in 1915, she gave him her diamond ring to carry with him, so that, she told him, he would have to come back to return it to her.

Rosedale Years

In Rosedale Lorena kept a loud police whistle, which she would step outside and blow when she wanted the children home. She had a head for a deal, too. When the Soldier Settlement Board advertised for farm equipment, she sold them the family's plow, harrows, wagon, and mower over Tom's doubts, got a good enough price to buy better replacements, and still had $250 left over. In the late 1920s, when her son Laurie went out with girls she didn't approve of, she would sit in her rocking chair in the kitchen and pray until he came home.

Her grown children had scattered to Vancouver, Ferndale, Bellingham, Nooksack, and Seattle, and the family records are one long procession of visits: sons, daughters, grandchildren, cousins, and passing missionaries filling the house weekend after weekend. Lorena wrote to every one of her children every week. She sang duets with her daughter Erna at Bible-class socials, delivered the Mother's Day prayer at the Union Sunday School, hosted her daughter Raye's wedding at home in 1929, and went with Tom to the Advent Christian camp meetings at Nooksack. In the winter of 1930–31 she and Tom stayed with their son Alvin in Pasadena, and from there she shipped orange blossoms home for her daughter Elsie to wear at her wedding.

A Near Miss and a Long Widowhood

Tom died of cancer in February 1933, after a long and painful illness, and caring for him left Lorena worn out. Living with her daughter Erna, she grew too weak to feed herself and dropped to sixty-five pounds, and one doctor gave her five days to live. A second doctor, George Roberts, recognized pernicious anemia, a vitamin B12 deficiency, and gave her liver-extract injections every day. By the tenth day she could feed herself again. She mostly recovered, though her feet troubled her afterward and she tripped easily, and from then on she ate raw liver to keep the anemia from coming back.

She went on to fourteen more years in Rosedale. She served the United Church's Women's Missionary Society as visiting convener and often led its prayers, traveled to family reunions (one in 1937 drew thirty-seven relatives), and gave to the Red Cross's war appeal in 1941. That June, at a Women's Institute party for local grandmothers, she was found to have more great-grandchildren than anyone else there. Her son Laurie remembered her as "quiet and unassuming, perhaps a little reserved... Mother always regarded Dad as the leader of the family, but behind it all Mother was the mastermind. Without raising her voice, she commanded complete authority." Her son Alvin called her "a plain little woman, unknown perhaps, beyond the borders of her immediate community, but to us she was Queen of the World," and her grandson Ray remembered "a tall, kind, and soft-spoken person."

Lorena died in her sleep at home in Rosedale on April 26, 1947, at eighty-one, after a throat hemorrhage that followed two weeks of bronchopneumonia, four months of heart trouble, and twelve years of pernicious anemia. She was buried in the Odd Fellows section of Mountainview Cemetery in Chilliwack.