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| Savanna La Mar Baptist Church |
Mrs. Frances Annabelle Kirkham, 1862-1933, nee Henderson, was the person to whom God gave the vision of forming a Baptist women’s movement in Jamaica.
Frances Annabelle was born in Clarendon,
Jamaica, to British parents, George and Caroline Henderson, nee Drayton. In
1818, George Henderson, who was born in Hoxton, London, England, was joined in
matrimony to Caroline in London. They came to Jamaica Baptist missionaries in
1842.
Frances Kirkham
Frances Henderson got married to Augustus George Kirkham, whom the General Baptist Missionary Society in England designated a missionary to Jamaica. He arrived in the country in 1877 and, on February 23, 1883, got married to Frances Henderson in the Mt Angus Baptist Church in St Mary. Although the Kirkhams had eight children – five daughters and three sons – Frances found time to offer real support to her husband both in his ministry in the Mt Angus circuit, where she contributed to the development of JBU J. T. Dillon, who became an outstanding JBU minister, and in the Savanna-La-Mar circuit.
The dream of forming the JBWF came first to Frances Annabelle Kirkland.[1] She shared the dream with her husband and, later, with Rev. Alfred and Mrs. Ann Miller who agreed to support the formation of the body. Mrs. Kirkland dreamed of organizing women in Baptist churches in Jamaica into a nation-wide body for fellowship and joint missional action. Kirkham’s dream came to reality in 1922 when the JBWF was formed in Bethel Town.
The women meeting in Bethel Town and forming the JBWF chose Kirkland as the first president of the movement and over many years, she devoted herself to a work which she believed was the result of a heavenly vision.
When she was more than 70 years old, Mrs. Kirkham died in the Montego Bay Hospital on April 4, 1933. She was a woman beloved in the churches her husband served and the parish of Westmoreland generally.
She was survived by her husband and many children – Alice, Bertram, Minnie, Arthur, Edith, Ernest, Daisy and Violet. Her husband outlived her by five years, dying while retired in Grandvale, Westmoreland in 1937, after completing 50 years as pastor of the Savanna La Mar circuit.
May Mrs. Kirkland be accorded her
rightful place in the history and life of the
Jamaica Baptist Women’s Federation.
[1] Inez Knibb
Sibley, The Baptists of Jamaica 1793 to 1965. (Kingston, JA: Jamaica Baptist Union, 1965), citing Ernest
Price, The History of the Jamaica Baptist Women’s Federation (Kingston,
Jamaica: Jamaica Baptist Union, n. d.), 35.
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