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When Emily Severs Howard died in 1892, only three years after the death of her husband, Dr Robert Palmer Howard, the three Howard children were left to be raised by their Irish Governess, Rachel McGill, and the kindness of their parents' friends. Being different ages (Muriel at 17, Campbell at 15, and Marjorie at 10) the children had divergent interests, expectations, and social circles.
Almost a grown woman, Beatrice Muriel Howard (typically referred to by her middle name) was finishing her formal education, and was preparing to enter a period between school and marriage in which her main preoccupations were to be her family, her friends, and forming fruitful social connections. Following her sister and Rachel McGill to Dresden, where Marjorie attended school, Muriel returned to Montreal in 1897 to head the Howard home, now reduced only to herself, Miss McGill, and her brother, who was, or would soon be, undertaking his initial medical training nearby at McGill University. However, her position at the head of the Howard family came to an end with her marriage in 1904 to Dr Edmond von Eberts (1873-1946). Dropping the "von" with the First World War, the McGill trained Dr Eberts eventually became Professor of Surgery at McGill and an Attending Surgeon at the Montreal General Hospital.
As a young teenager at the time of his parents' death, Campbell Palmer Howard (1877-1936) still needed to complete high school before following his father's career and studying medicine at McGill. Visiting his sisters in Dresden between 1894 and 1897, Campbell spent most of the mid-late 1890s in Montreal pursuing his education. With the family home near by (First on Sherbrooke Street and later on Mansfield), he was able to attend the university and have his older sister and childhood governess keep house for him.
Graduating from McGill in 1902, Campbell pursued further medical training at Johns Hopkins University, where he was an assistant of the Howard family friend and father figure, William Osler. When he returned to practice medicine in Montreal in 1907, Campbell was cared for at 58 McKay Street by his younger sister, who kept house for the young doctor. When Marjorie married and left with her husband for Baltimore in 1909, Campbell remained at the family home until 1910 when he was appointed to the Chair of Medicine at the University of Iowa. Marrying Ottilie Wright of Ottawa the following year, they soon had two children and eventually returned to Montreal where Campbell took up the Chair of Medicine at McGill and became the Director of the Department of Medicine at the Montreal General Hospital.
Robert Jared Bliss Howard (1859-1921) was Marjorie Gwendolen Howard's half-brother and the only child of Robert Palmer Howard and his first wife, Mary Frances Chipman, who died in 1872. Trained in medicine at McGill and practicing in Montreal, Jared married Margaret C. Smith, the daughter of the Scottish-Canadian business leader and politician, Donald Smith, the future Lord Strathcona. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Jared Howard and his family lived in Britain, where Donald Smith was Canada's High Commissioner. By the time Marjorie visited them at Lord Strathcona's various British residences in 1905, Jared and his wife had five children, Frances (later Kitson, 1889-1958), Donald (1891-1959), Robert ("Harry," 1893-1915), Edith (later Parnell, Lady Congleton, 1895-1979), and Arthur (1896-1971).
