Cline's Mother

From a profile in Recreation, August 1896

Jessie Forsyth was the fifth of six children of Oscar Fitzalan Forsyth (1827-1901), a hardware merchant, and his wife Elizabeth M. [born Mary Elizabeth] Beardsley (1825-1891), who were married in Brockport, New York, on 19 October 1849.  They settled in Michigan, first in Flint and then in 1874 in Bay City. Of their six children, two died in infancy, and of the four remaining children, there were three daughters and one son. The Forsyth family was proud to be related, though distantly, to the Civil War  General George Alexander Forsyth (1837-1915), known as "Sandy" Forsyth.

Jessie Forsyth, born in Flint on 16 February 1865, and her two older sisters, Kate Forsyth (1850-1937) and Zaidee (over the years her name was also spelt Sadie or Sade) Forsyth (1852-1932) were also members of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Kate and Zaidee never married. 

Jessie attended Helmuth College in London, Ontario, and the Detroit Training School of Elocution and English Literature, graduating in 1887. She taught for the year 1887-1888 at the College of the Sisters of Bethany in Topeka, Kansas, before returning to Bay City.  She married Leonard Lanson Cline (1858-1904) at the Forsyth family home in Bay City on 22 January 1890.  Her two children were Elizabeth Forsyth Cline (1891-1966) and Leonard Lanson Cline, Jr. (1893-1929). In the early 1890s the Cline family moved to Detroit.

After her husband's death in 1904, Jessie moved her family to Ann Arbor, where she ran a boarding house close to the University of Michigan. In 1913, after both her children quit the university (Elizabeth, after two years; and Leonard, after three years), Jessie sold out and moved to California, where she remarried at least once.  Her spinster sisters followed her out to California.  She died as Jessie F. Harte in Los Angeles on 12 April 1939.

Beginning in the 1890s, Jessie wrote and published occasional articles, stories, and poems, sometimes anonymously, sometimes signed as by Jessie F. Cline or Jessie Forsyth Cline, and sometimes under an unrecorded masculine pseudonym.  Her work appeared in magazines such as Recreation, Kate Field's Washington, and Werner's Magazine.  Her writings also appeared in various newspapers, including the Detroit News-Tribune.