Canada’s Father of Confederation, the great John A. Macdonald of Kingston, married his first wife on this date in 1843.  It was an exciting time for both Kingston (which was then the capital city of the United Province of Canada) and John, who was 28 at the time.  Only months earlier (in March 1843), Macdonald had been elected a Kingston Alderman; and, he was only months away from his election to the legislature of the United Province of Canada. John A.’s wife was his half-cousin, Isabella Clark, whom he had met on a recent trip back to the country of his birth, Scotland. The couple would enjoy only two happy years of marriage before Isabella began to suffer from a debilitating illness that would end her life in 1857, when she was only 48.  The couple lost one child at age 13 months.  Their other child, Hugh John, would go on to become Premier of Manitoba. In February 1867 John A. Macdonald would marry again, this time to Agnes Bernard, the sister of his private secretary, Hewitt Bernard. caption id="attachment_633555" align="alignleft" width="254" Isabella Macdonald/caption Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.