Postmaster, municipal official.
Born at Westbury-on-Severn, Gloucester, England on 23 March 1853, he was apprenticed to a local clothing merchant at the age of fourteen. He immigrated to Canada in 1874, arriving at Toronto on Thanksgiving day, taking employment at Campbellford, Ontario, until 1877. He moved to Manitoba in 1878, travelling by the way of Moorhead and the Red and Assiniboine Rivers to Portage la Prairie. He took up his first homestead and preemption in the Salisbury district eight miles north-west of what is now the village of Arden.
In 1881 he helped in organizing the Salisbury School District No. 127 and served several terms as School Trustee and Chair of the School Board. When the Rural Municipality of Lansdowne was organized in 1884, he was appointed clerk and retained the position until 1936, then continuing as assistant to his son, Wilfrid, who succeeded him. He served as postmaster at Arden from 1884 to the time of his death. He was President of the Beautiful Plains Sunday School Association for twenty-five years, President of the Manitoba Sunday School Association, and a member of the Board of Wesley College. He attended the 1905 founding meeting, in Brandon, of the Union of Manitoba Municipalities.
He married Elizabeth Crawford (1860-1886, daughter of James T. Crawford of the Salisbury district) and they had three children: Annie Roan Boughton (1881-1900), Walter McGregor Boughton (1883-1917), and an unnamed son (1886-1886). After his first wife’s death, he married her younger sister Grace Crawford (1864-1906) on 2 March 1888 at Portage la Prairie. They had seven children: Harvey Crawford Boughton (1889-1970), Wilfrid Coleman Boughton (1891-1959, father of Keith Donald Boughton), Ruth Thorpe Boughton (1893-1981, wife of John G. Rayner), Frederick Barling Boughton (1894-1895), Catherine Morrison Boughton (1896-1981, wife of John A. Sly), Phoebe Vaughan Boughton (1901-2001), and Elizabeth Roan Boughton (1903-1994). In recognition of his community service, he received the King George V Jubilee Medal (1935).
He died at Arden on 1 April 1947 and was buried in the Arden Cemetery.
See also:
Historic Sites of Manitoba: Lansdowne Municipal Office (Arden, Municipality of Glenella-Lansdowne)
MHS Resources: Manitoba Bricks and Blocks
Birth, marriage, and death registrations, Manitoba Vital Statistics.
1901 Canada census, Automated Genealogy.
“Chat at convention,” Winnipeg Free Press, 12 July 1935, page 11.
“M. E. Boughton, postmaster, dies,” Winnipeg Free Press, 2 April 1947. [Manitoba Legislative Library, Biographical Scrapbook B9]
Obituary, Western Municipal News, October 1958, page 313.
Obituary [Keith Donald Boughton], Winnipeg Free Press, 28 July 2014.
Obituaries and burial transcriptions, Manitoba Genealogical Society.
We thank Wendy Boughton for providing additional information used here.
This page was prepared by Gordon Goldsborough.
Page revised: 7 February 2021
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