Thomas Glendenning Hamilton
Thomas Glendenning Hamilton (November 27, 1873 – April 7, 1935) was a Canadian doctor, school board trustee, and member of the Manitoba legislature from 1915 to 1920.
[3] He married Lillian May Forrester three years later and in 1910 set up a private medical practice in a home, later known as Hamilton House, located on what is now Henderson Highway in Elmwood, a suburb of Winnipeg.
The Liberals won a landslide majority in this election, and Hamilton served as a backbench supporter of Tobias Norris's government for the next five years.
[citation needed] Hamilton sought re-election in the 1920 provincial election, in the restructured ten-member constituency of Winnipeg.
[11] Hamilton's daughter Margaret attributed the family's lifelong search for life after death to this event.
Her mother, having read Frederic William Henry Myers's book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, encouraged her husband to investigate the phenomenon.
[12] Hamilton began with the use of a Ouija board and experiments with telepathy with his United Church minister, Reverend Daniel Normal McLachlan.
He wanted to investigate paranormal phenomena such as rappings, psychokinesis, ectoplasm, and materializations under scientific conditions that would minimize any possibility of error.
A bank of about a dozen cameras were focussed on the side of the room where activity was to take place, their shutters open, waiting for Hamilton to set off a flash in order for them to all take photos at the same time.
Many of the persons who attended the home circles were also doctors and businessmen, such as the lawyer Isaac Pitblado and Rh blood specialist Bruce Chown.
[23] From that time until his death, Hamilton delivered 86 lectures and wrote numerous articles published in Canada and abroad.
[25] Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and Americans Mina Crandon, the medium known as "Margery", and her husband, L.R.G.
When Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series, came to Winnipeg as part of a cross-North American tour in 1923, he attended one of the Hamiltons' home circles.
Lillian and her son James Drummond produced a summary of Hamilton's work in the book Intention and Survival, published in 1942.
The family's fonds, or papers, consist of 2.5 linear metres of textual and other materials and include scrapbooks, séance attendance records and registers, affidavits, automatic writings, correspondence, speeches and lectures, news clippings, journal articles, photographs, glass plate negatives and positives, prints, slides, audio tapes, manuscripts, and promotional materials related to major publications.
[34] Hamilton's photographs and his family's archives are a major component of the work of Belfast artist Susan MacWilliam, which appeared in the 2009 Venice Biennale.
[38] Hamilton's photos have appeared in films, including Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg (2008) and the horror production The Haunting in Connecticut (2009), among others.
