Since writing the sketch for the _ANB_, I received copies of some family
records from a member of the Forsyth family in Western Australia (Ron
Forsyth).  I wrote up these family records as a short article; Scott Haine
will publish it in the _SHAR_ sometime when he has the space to spare.

At 08:13 AM 12/2/1999 -0500, you wrote:
>American National Biography entry penned by our very own David M. Fahey.
>
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>Date:         Wed, 1 Dec 1999 02:00:01 -0500
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>The following biography is from the American National Biography,
>published by Oxford University Press. Copyright 1999 ACLS.
>
>
>Forsyth, Jessie (29 Apr. 1847-18 Sept. 1937), temperance reformer,
>was born in London, England, the daughter of Andrew Forsyth, a
>baker, and Eliza Maria Kitteridge, both of Scottish origin. The
>caricaturist and illustrator George Cruikshank was her great-uncle.
>Ill health left her with a skimpy formal education. She was a
>devout, lifelong member of the Church of England. Orphaned in her
>teens, Forsyth found her sense of belonging in a fraternal
>temperance society, the militantly prohibitionist Independent (later
>International) Order of Good Templars. According to her memoirs, she
>had not been a teetotaler when her desire to make new friends and
>enjoy sociable weekly lodge meetings persuaded her to become a Good
>Templar in 1872. Late in 1874 she sailed to the United States to
>take a job as a bookkeeper for a printing company in Boston,
>Massachusetts. Within a few months she joined an American lodge of
>the Templar Order.
>
>Organized in central New York in 1852, the IOGT endorsed the
>equality of women as members and officeholders. This universalist
>ideology embraced all teetotalers who advocated prohibition. In 1868
>the Order claimed over 500,000 members in North America (a figure
>that quickly shrank) and later added hundreds of thousands in
>Britain (and its empire) and Scandinavia. Most members were young,
>often from working- or lower middle-class families, and, even when
>they remained abstainers, they tended to drift quickly out of the
>organization. Forsyth's lifelong commitment was exceptional.
>
>In 1876, quarreling over the rights of blacks in the American South
>who wanted to become members, the Good Templars split into two rival
>international organizations. Americans and Canadians accused the
>British of seeking to take over the Order and made the retention of
>white Southern members their highest priority. At a time when the
>IOGT was losing members in most American states, membership was
>growing among Southern whites. Forsyth belonged to a small minority
>of Massachusetts Good Templars who supported the predominantly
>British party in condemning racism as contrary to the Good Templar
>principle of universal brotherhood and sisterhood. She was an
>admirer of William Wells Brown, a Boston physician, who was the
>leading African American in her Good Templar organization.
>
>In 1883 Forsyth was elected Right Worthy Grand Vice Templar in her
>faction's international organization and was appointed the editor of
>its monthly newspaper, Temperance Brotherhood. She also became the
>American agent for the British committee that financed the campaign
>to recruit blacks. Once shy, she became an effective organizer and
>speaker and, in 1885-1886, traveled to Britain, Germany, and
>Scandinavia. She also wrote prolifically, including memoirs,
>didactic essays, biographical sketches, stories for children, and
>verse. After the Order reunited in 1887 on what amounted to a
>segregated basis, Forsyth remained Vice Templar until 1889.
>
>At this time interested in socialism, Forsyth became a charter
>member and secretary of the Second Boston Nationalist Club in 1889,
>inspired by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). She was a
>staunch advocate of women's suffrage and occasionally criticized the
>Good Templars for failing to live up to their ideals of gender
>equality.
>
>Beginning in 1893 Forsyth led the Good Templar international work
>for children. By the time that an Englishman defeated her for
>reelection, in 1908, Good Templar juvenile auxiliaries claimed
>nearly 240,000 members. The triumph of state prohibition contributed
>to the virtual disappearance of Good Templary in the United States,
>and the weakness of the Order in its birthplace helped explain
>Forsyth's defeat. Europeans dominated the membership, so Britons,
>Swedes, and Norwegians won election to most of the international
>offices. Forsyth's editorship of the monthly International Good
>Templar, begun in 1901, also ended in 1908, when a Scotsman defeated
>its American owner for reelection as international secretary. In
>1911 she retired from the printing shop where she had worked all her
>American days, and which for the last eight or nine years she had
>owned. She then emigrated to Australia.
>
>In January 1912 Forsyth arrived in Freemantle, Western Australia,
>where her sister lived. Although she briefly held office in the
>local Grand Lodge of the IOGT, she devoted most of her energy to the
>Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which she served as state
>president for Western Australia from 1913 to 1916. In 1917-1918 she
>was organizing secretary of the Australian National Prohibition
>League in Melbourne. She then returned to Western Australia where,
>in 1919, she founded the Dawn, a newspaper for women reformers, and
>resumed work for the state WCTU. In 1922 ill health forced her to
>curtail her service to temperance, although she continued to write,
>notably a newspaper column for children.
>
>In her memoirs, published in Good Templar periodicals, Forsyth said
>almost nothing about her life outside the Order. She never married,
>although she loved children and cherished friendships with many men
>and women. She said that without the Good Templars her life would
>have been colorless and lonely.
>
>Until her death in Leederville, a suburb of Perth, Western
>Australia, Forsyth remained committed to her Order. She regarded its
>program of total abstinence and prohibition, combined with universal
>brotherhood and sisterhood, as a moral crusade that offered a
>foundation for other social reforms, such as women's rights, racial
>justice, and the conquest of poverty.
>
>Bibliography
>Letters from Forsyth are in the George F. Cotterill Papers in the
>University of Washington libraries and in the Grand Lodge of
>Wisconsin, IOGT, papers at the State Historical Society of
>Wisconsin. Her principal memoir, "Thirty Years of Good Templary,"
>was published in the International Good Templar (1903-1904),
>reprinted in The Collected Writings of Jessie Forsyth, 1847-1937:
>The Good Templars and Temperance Reform on Three Continents, ed.
>David M. Fahey (1988), with an editorial introduction, "One Woman's
>World." See also Ernest Hurst Cherrington, ed., Standard
>Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, 6 vols. (1925-1930).
>
>Written by David M. Fahey
>
>
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