[1] On 28 February 1841, at Rocky Mountain House, the 24-year-old Cunningham married Margaret Mondion, whose origins are uncertain, though she may have come from the White Horse Plains area in Manitoba.
Anne, Alberta, and the couple only had one child, Catherine, born on 18 December 1847, who died in the following month, as pointed out in Rundle's Journal on 24 January 1848, ironically the last time he is mentioned there.
[1][3] After a hiatus of seven years, Cunningham reappeared in 1855, aged 38, when he was hired as an interpreter by the HBC, being in charge at Lac Ste Anne in 1857–58, and then becoming a postmaster and clerk at Fort Edmonton, a position that he held for a decade, from 1858 until his retirement in 1868.
[1] In the autumn of 1866, Cunningham led a group that had 15 mixed-blood traders to a camp of Bloods, whose head chief had sent a messenger to Fort Edmonton requesting a trading party, but their journey was halted by a group of Blackfoot warriors who had previously attacked Fort Pitt, and one of its chiefs, the towering Big Swan, forced his way through the crowd and delivered a heated speech criticizing the traders.
His wife, a faith devotee, strove to influence her children and Matheson to become a priest, and she succeeded with her second son Edward, who was educated at Ottawa University and ordained by Bishop Grandin in Alberta in 1890.