(5 March 1842-15 March 1916), lawyer. (E. H. Tiffany, Edward H. Tiffany) Born at Hamilton, Ont. Parents: George Sylvester Tiffany, a barrister, and his wife, who was probably Eliza Anne Strange. The brothers Gideon and Silvester (Sylvester) Tiffany, the celebrated printers and newspaper publishers of early Upper Canada, were relatives, probably great-uncles, of E. H. Tiffany. E. H. Tiffany was educated at Hamilton and at Upper Canada College, the University of Toronto and Osgoode Hall. He served as a soldier with the 13th Regiment, of Hamilton, at the Battle of Ridgeway, which was fought between the Canadians and the invading Fenians on 2 June 1866. E. H. Tiffany was called to the bar in 1867. He was a lawyer at Ridgetown, Ont., then moved to Alexandria in 1874, and was a lawyer there for the remainder of his career. He was solicitor for the Montreal and City of Ottawa Junction Railway which D. A. Macdonald and other Glengarrians were attempting at that time to have built across GC (Witness 9 Sept. 1878 ), and afterwards he was solicitor for the Canada Atlantic Railway.

     When work was undertaken to found a newspaper in Alexandria (the Glengarrian, but known at first as the Glengarry Review), Tiffany was elected president of the company at the first meeting of the board of directors. (Cornwall Freeholder 9 Nov. 1883). J.A. Valin was his law student in the 1880s. Tiffany was Patrick Purcell’s agent in Alexandria for moneylending until Purcell for some reason made Murdoch Munro his agent instead, probably in 1885. (Purcell 1887 38, 43) At the notorious trial at Cornwall in 1888 which probed the irregularities of the GC election of 1887 (see Purcell), Tiffany was one of the attacking, and anti-Purcellite, counsel. In 1889, Tiffany became the law partner of J.A. Macdonell (Greenfield) in a firm called Tiffany and Macdonell. At the consecration in St. Finnan’s Cathedral of Bishop Macdonell in 1890, Tiffany, accompanied by R. R. (Big Rory) McLennan and Brock Ostrom read the address from the Protestants of Alexandria and district. (DTL Standard Freeholder 30 Oct. 1948)

     E. H. Tiffany was made a Q. C. in 1896. (Glengarry News 17 July 1896) He died at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal, predeceased by his wife. Burial was in the Protestant cemetery, Alexandria. Tiffany was a Presbyterian and a Mason. For thirty years he was organist of the Presbyterian church in Alexandria. He was a skilled violin player, and fond of jokes, but was often unsuccessful in getting other people to see the point of them. Clarence Ostrom says the term “Tiffany Joke” came into use locally to designate a failed joke. In the age of GC nicknames, a certain MacDonald was known as Tiffany Number Two. Evidently no technological reactionary, about 1892 Tiffany installed what are believed to have been the first telephones in Alexandria, one in his home and one in his office. Many clients, he told Clarence Ostrom, were amazed at someone speaking into a mechanical device.

     Tiffany was the author of The Law of Registration of Titles in Ontario; Being an Annotation of ‘The Registry Act’ (pp. xvii, 490; Toronto and Edinburgh, Carswell and Co., Law Publishers, 1881). Harkness in 1946 thought it “still a very useful book of reference.” A copy of this volume sold for $100 in the 1970s. A letter of Tiffany’s to the Montreal Gazette appears in The Coteau Bridge Controversy booklet of 1880) (see Sir Donald Macmaster). The fact that in the early 1880s Tiffany was president of the Mechanics’ Institute (i.e., library) in Alexandria presumably indicates some sympathy for literature. He wrote (as did Ralph Connor: C. W. Gordon) a lukewarm testimonial for the Rev. John D. McEwen’s pamphlet Glimpses of South America (1914?), printed in the list of testimonials at the end of McEwan’s Brazil (1916). From this, it would seem that both Tiffany and Connor had mastered the art of faint praise. At the beginning of World War I Tiffany wrote the “Canadian War Hymn,” which he dated at Alexandria 11 Aug. 1914. (printed Cornwall Standard 30 Aug. 1914)

     He was married to Annie Gertrude Pringle (Gertrude Pringle), who died 29 June 1893, in the 43rd year of her age. (two children) Her father was James Dunbar Pringle, the brother of Judge Pringle, and her grandfather was Col. Alexander Fraser of Fraserfield. Through this marriage, Tiffany became linked with not only the Pringles and the Frasers of Fraserfield, but also with the Sandfield Macdonalds and the family connection of Sheriff D.E. McIntyre. One of their children, Dr George Sylvester Tiffany, who worked for the Sun Life Assurance Co., was a physician with a McGill medical degree (1898) but did not practise.

Cornwall Freeholder 16 March 1916 (repr. of Montreal Gazette obituary), Glengarry News 17 March 1916, and Cornwall Standard 23 March 1916 (essentially, a supplemented version of the Montreal Gazette obituary) * Ostrom 51, 332 * Harkness 423, 435 * MacGillivray & Ross 344-345 & index * GN supplement 1903 6 * obituary of his wife, marriage of his daughter, ASC ii, 114, 151, 110 * Mechanics’ Institute: MacGillivray & Ross 265; Glengarry Times 20 May 1882 * advertises money to lend, Glengarry Times 3 June 1881 * Macdonell partnership: Glengarrian 15 & 22 Nov. 1889 (with advert. for “Tiffany & Macdonell,” barristers); CF 22 Nov. 1889, cited DTL Standard Freeholder 20 Nov. 1948 * receives Fenian Raid medal, GN 26 Jan. 1900 * Alexandria Fire of 1903 destroys his stables, damages his house, GN 1 May 1903 * takes part in concert and play at Alexandria, GN 24 March 1905, 10 Oct. 1913 * contributes to celebration of a Dickens society, Toronto, GN 16 Feb. 1906 * J. Ross Robertson, The History of Freemasonry in Canada (1900), I, 472 * Gideon and Silvester (Sylvester) Tiffany: Dictionary of Canadian Biography Vols.VIII, V, resp.