(6 March 1891-10 Dec. 1957), lawyer. (D. A. Macdonald, Q. C.; Donald Sandfield) Born at Alexandria, GC. Parents: Alexander George Fraser Macdonald and his wife Eugenie Hubert. He was therefore of the “Sandfield” Macdonald family. He was the great-nephew of John Sandfield Macdonald and the grandson of the Hon. D. A. Macdonald, lieutenant-governor of Ontario, as well as being the great-grandson of Col. Alexander Fraser of Fraserfield. Also he was the brother of Eugene A. Macdonald, editor from the 1940s to the 1980s of the family newspaper the Glengarry News, of Alexandria. Donald Alexander was educated at Loyola College, Montreal, and at Laval University (B. A.), and at Osgood Hall (1910-1913), Toronto. He was “completely bilingual” (obituary), having learned French from his mother, which latter-born siblings in his family did not do.

     Called to the bar in 1913, he almost immediately afterwards and within the same year opened a law office in Alexandria, and started a branch office (which probably he did not continue for long) in Maxville. (Glengarry News 19 Sept. & 17 & 24 Oct. 1913) In 1929 he became the law partner of his relative John A. Macdonell (Jack Greenfield) in the law firm Macdonell and Macdonald. (F. T. Costello had formerly been Macdonell’s partner, but had left the firm on becoming a judge in 1929.) Macdonald’s partnership with Jack Greenfield was short, for the latter died in 1930. Adrien E. Richard was thereafter associated in legal practice with Macdonald for two years, though Richard’s name did not appear in the firm’s title. In 1945, G. G. Aubry became a law partner with Macdonald. (GN 12 Oct. 1945) The law firm continues today, an Alexandria institution, under the name still of Macdonald & Aubry. Macdonald was made a K. C. in 1933. (GN 9 June 1933)

     Macdonald was very active over many years in local organizations and in promoting the economic well being of a town which, by the 1930s, had declined a long way from its industrial boom days of the 1890s. He was a long-time member of St. Finnan’s choir and of the Knights of Columbus. He served also on the Alexandria Town Council. Active in athletics in his youth, he was later a promoter and supporter of the local sports scene. In 1946, on behalf of the Alexandria Board of Trade, he presented a brief to the Ontario Royal Commission on Forestry.

     Over many years he was highly active in the local Liberal associations. In 1945 Dr William Burton MacDiarmid, the incumbent MP, secured the Liberal renomination as candidate for the GC seat, though by a razor-thin majority, being almost defeated as a rival for the candidacy by Macdonald. (MacDiarmid was elected, but quickly resigned his seat to make way for Prime Minister Mackenzie King.) In 1948, there was considerable speculation that Macdonald was to be made a senator.

     He was the author of a small and unassuming but competent book of verse, My Reflections on Hospital Life (18 pp.,1953). In 1954 he was made a Knight of St. Gregory by Pope Pius XII. (Glengarry News 22 July & 30 Sept. 1954) He was married on 3 Feb. 1925 to Fernande Roy (d. 25 Sept. 1964) of Montreal. (three daughters)

     The appointment to the Senate did not take place, but anyone who wished to support Macdonald’s claim to a senatorship could point to the service to the party not only of himself, but of the family newspaper. There was also the nebulous, but not insignificant notion–based in part of Senator D. McMillan’s long tenure of a senatorship– found locally that Alexandria was in some way “entitled” to have a senator. And no doubt, too, there was public feeling that somehow, sometime, someone had to be rewarded (though to all appearances, no one ever was) for the brisk action by which the Glengarry seat was made available by the area Liberals to Mackenzie King when he needed it in 1945.

Glengarry News 12 Dec. 1957, Standard Freeholder 10 & 13 Dec. 1957 * Macdonald, Sandfields, with portrait * Prominent People of the Province of Ontario (1925) 138 * Harkness 436 * Ostrom 265 * Forestry Commission: see Bibliography of Glengarry 72-73 * biog. by Angus H. McDonell, prepared for Glengarry Sports Hall of Fame, GN 4 June 1986 (with line sketch by Douglas A. Fales) * speculation that he was to be made a senator: see SFH 17 Sept. (from Ottawa Citizen) & 18 Oct. 1948 (GC Liberal Association supports appointment), GN 15 Oct. 1948; see also lives of J. A. C. Huot, Dr W. B. MacDiarmid, and Senator D. McMillan * poem by, booklet of verse noted, GN 27 Feb. 1953; see also Bibliography of Glengarry 79