(30 Dec. 1926-23 June 1989), historian. (Elinor Kyte Senior, Elinor Senior, Nelly Senior) Born at Sydney, N. S. Parents: Frederick Laurence Kyte and his wife Suzannah Whymouthe Roberts. Elinor Kyte Senior had the degrees B.A. (1952) and Ph.D. (1976) from McGill University and her M.A. (1959) from Memorial University, Nfld. A journalist for the Sydney Post-Record and Montreal Star, she was afterwards a university teacher at McGill University and elsewhere. At Louisbourg, N.S., on 22 Sept. 1954, she was married to the Canadian historian Hereward Senior. (four children) He taught for many years in the History Dept. of McGill University. Elinor Kyte Senior died, of cancer, in Montreal. She was buried in Cornwall, Ont. Anglican.
Dr Senior was not a Glengarrian, but she made important contributions through her writings to the knowledge of GC history. The Cornwall authorities chose her to write the bicentennial history of their city, which was published as From Royal Township to Industrial City: Cornwall 1784-1984 (pp. 567; Belleville, Mika Publishing Company, 1983). This work, which arranges a vast mass of valuable factual information in a balanced and judicious narrative, is one of the very best of Canadian city histories, and is relevant to GC history through Cornwall being GC’s county town and through the Glengarrians who have always been a notable part of the Cornwall population. It is abbreviated in the notes to the present dictionary to the one word, Senior. Elinor Senior also wrote more directly about Glengarrians in “The Glengarry Highlanders and the Suppression of the Rebellions in Lower Canada 1837-38,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research (1978), and touched on the topic of Glengarrians in this rebellion also in her book Redcoats and Patriotes (1985) and her article “Suppressing Rebellion in Lower Canada,” Canadian Defence Quarterly (1988). Her life of Sir James Macdonell (of the Macdonell chiefs family) in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is lively and compresses much valuable information into a short space while finding room for several interesting notices of GC. She published a valuable biographical study of Sir Edward Peacock in her article “A Canadian at Court,” Monarchy Canada (1987). At least once, in Alexandria, she was the speaker at a meeting of the Glengarry Historical Society.
Entries for Elinor Kyte Senior and Hereward Senior in Canadian Who’s Who Vol. XXV (1990) 851 * The International Who’s Who of Women (1992) 406 * obituary in Monarchy Canada (Summer 1989), portrait * biog. note and portrait, on dustjacket of her history of Cornwall * personal information * Bibliography of Glengarry: index * Ian Bowering, Cornwall from Factory Town to Seaway City, I (1999) 3