Trinity Church was built in 1841 to serve the Anglican community of Christieville, later Iberville, and stands today as one of the clearest reminders of the English-speaking Protestant families who helped shape the Richelieu Valley in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alongside the church, the cemetery became the final resting place for generations of parishioners whose lives were bound to the church through worship, work, and family.
Among those families were the Milburns, McCaigs, Chapmans, and Proctors, names woven into both the parish and the burial ground behind it. Trinity was not only a place of faith, but of community continuity where children were baptized, marriages solemnized, and loved ones laid to rest.
One of the most enduring memorials within the church honours my great-grandfather Sapper Alexander Richardson Milburn, a parish member and stonemason by trade, who served with the 1st Canadian Engineers and was killed in action at Hill 70 on August 15, 1917. Though he has no known grave overseas, his memory is powerfully preserved at Trinity. In 1934, his children commissioned three stained-glass windows in the church, dedicating them to their father’s sacrifice.
The inscription urges future generations to remember: “Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten.”
Alexander’s family — including his daughter (my grandmother) Maggie Jane Milburn — is buried in Trinity Church cemetery, anchoring his story firmly to Iberville soil. Together, the windows and the graves link the cost of war abroad with the quiet endurance of family and community at home.
Today, Trinity Church and its cemetery stand not only as heritage landmarks, but as a testament to the families who built, sustained, and remembered — ensuring that names like Milburn, McCaig, Chapman, and Proctor remain part of the living history of Iberville.
