In Memoriam--Mrs. Frank P. Joseland

Bill Brown ..The Amoy Mission.
by Sadler, Rev. J., in Chinese Recorder, Vol. 40, 1909, pp. 45-46

OUR beloved friend and fellow-worker, Mrs. Frank P. Joseland, has been translated to the higher service. We are bowed in spirit for the stricken husband and children, as well as for ourselves, our schools, the Chinese Christians and for all who knew her kindness and care.

The loss is deeply felt both in Amoy and Chiang-chiu and in the districts inland. Mrs. Joseland has been connected with the L. M. S. for twenty years. She has proved a valued teacher, wife, mother, and friend. Her experience of human life was considerable, and she knew how to say the "word in season" to those who were in trouble.

Coming from a well-known ministerial family in England (her father being a Congregational minister for long years, still hale and hearty at seventy-eight years of age), and having received a valuable training in the Milton Congregational College for Girls at Gravesend, she was eminently fitted to do good service in teaching. She improved her powers and endeared herself to the schools of boys, girls, and women, where she regularly taught. Her efforts were carried on even in spite of physical suffering and with much self-denial.

She was born forty-five years ago at Barnard Castle in Durham, when her father was minister there, and lived at Haverill, Honiton, and Devizes, at which places her father had pastoral charge. She was married to Mr. Joseland in the Union Church, Hongkong, by the Rev. G. H. Bondfield, in November, 1888, and so has had just twenty years of married life and mutual service with her husband, with two furloughs in the home land.

So far as the L. M. S. in Amoy itself was concerned, Mrs. Joseland was the only married lady in the Mission, and was thus the more valued, especially as she was given to hospitality- and exercised a gracious influence over those who needed a friend. Hence her loss will be most keenly felt. Her elder brother, the Rev. C. E. Darwent, M.A., of the Union Church, Shanghai, is famous as an example of the ability of the family. To him, also, the news of his sister's early death is truly bitter. There are four children—two elder boys, nineteen and seventeen years old, and two other children, a girl of thirteen and a boy of eight, at home at school. All these have now the burden of being motherless to bear, while yet young. May God give them the needed strength to endure.

The saddest and most tragic feature of the unexpected loss was the fact that the afflicted husband was travelling in a distant part of the very extensive inland region under his charge, where neither letters nor messengers could reach him in time. Thus our brother, who left his wife in good health in October, returned at the end of November to her not only dead, but buried.

The illness began with dysentery on November 8th, but it yielded to remedies, and nothing was feared till the 20th, when more serious symptoms intervened, and Mrs. Joseland passed peacefully away on Tuesday, November 24th. She was buried the day after in the Community Cemetery on Kulangsu, followed to the grave by the largest number of people, both foreigners and Chinese, ever seen at a funeral in Amoy. A number of foreign gentlemen carried the coffin from the Mortuary Chapel to the grave. The Rev. J. Macgowan read the service in English, and the Rev. J. Sadler addressed the Chinese assembled and offered prayer. Suitable hymns were sung in both languages, ''Jesus, Lover of my Soul", and ''There is a Happy Land". Thus, amidst grief and pain, the note of Resurrection Joy was struck, and our hearts followed our sainted sister to her heaventy home.

Her work lives after her, and the memory of her gracious, kindly presence is enshrined in the hearts of hundreds of those who knew her. For to know^ her was to love her. "She, being dead, yet speaketh."

Other Joseland Pages
Frank Joseland Describes Amoy Area

Inquiries about Joselands

The Amoy Mission Project

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