Montgomery’s ancestors were among the wealthy and educated immigrants who came to the Island of Saint John (now Prince Edward Island) from Scotland in the 1770s. Her maternal great-grandfather, William Simpson Macneill, was a member of the provincial legislature from 1814 to 1838, and Speaker of the House of Assembly. Her paternal grandfather, Donald Montgomery, served in the provincial legislature from 1832 to 1874 and was appointed by Sir John A. Macdonald to be a senator in the federal government from 1873 to 1893. Montgomery’s mother, Clara Woolner Macneill, died from tuberculosis in 1876 at the age of 23. Montgomery was not yet two, but she claimed that her earliest…