Silas Tertius Rand - Life

Life

Silas Rand and was born in the community of Brooklyn Street about six miles west of Kentville, Nova Scotia in the Township of Cornwallis. He was a son of bricklayer Silas Rand and his wife Deborah Tupper. Though largely uneducated, his father taught the younger Rand to read and later sent him to school, which he attended until the age of 11. He then took up bricklaying with his father. At age nineteen, Rand was introduced to English grammar and he began the study of languages. By age 21, he began teaching grammar. At 23, he entered Horton Academy (part of Acadia University) to study Latin but he left the school a month later, learning Latin grammar at home while he worked as a bricklayer.

In 1833 he underwent a religious conversion. He was baptized and decided to devote his life to God. In 1834 he was ordained a Baptist minister. He took a position in Liverpool, Nova Scotia where he met Jane Elizabeth McNutt, whom he married in 1838. The couple had twelve children. Rand was later a pastor in Windsor, Nova Scotia and Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

In 1846 he was offered an opportunity to travel to Burma as a missionary, but he elected instead to work among the Mi'kmaq. He obtained the support of the Protestant evangelicals of Halifax and in 1849 helped found the Micmac Missionary Society, a full-time Mi'kmaq mission. Basing his work in Hantsport, Nova Scotia, where he lived from 1853 until his death, he travelled widely among Mi'kmaq communities, spreading the faith, learning the language, and recording examples of the Mi'kmaq oral tradition. He was poorly funded in his work, and had to resort to colportage, or begging to sustain his mission. By 1864 he decided to rely on unsolicited donations, trusting in faith to provide, and was thus expelled from the Society, which was dissolved, in 1870.

After a long period of disagreement with the Baptist church, he eventually returned to the church in 1885. He died at Hantsport in 1889.