Episcopal Diocese of Northern Indiana Archives

Ven. Joseph William Gubbins

The Rev. Joseph W. Gubbins was born in Lake View, Cook County, Illinois, on 4 January 1889, the son of George G. and Katherine (Adams) Gubbins. He married Ethel I. Zander on 10 October 1911, but they later divorced, a fact that may not have been known at the time of his ministry. During World War I he served, he claimed, as a chaplain in the U.S. Navy at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station and as a chaplain at the Edward Hines Hospital. However, the 1920 census lists him as a chauffeur. He studied for the ministry at Western Theological Seminary and at Nashotah House and did his early ministry work in southwestern Kansas in the missionary district of Salina. He was later vicar of St. Ignatius Church in Eagle River, Wisconsin, rector of the Church of Our Savior and canon at St. Philip's Cathedral in Atlanta. He came to northern Indiana in 1928, when Bishop Gray made him archdeacon. He moved to Huntington to oversee Christ Church, but he also maintained the missionary stations of St. Mary's Delphi, Columbia City, St. Luke's Hartford City, and the Church of the Holy Spirit in Warsaw. In 1931 he was the interim rector of Trinity Fort Wayne for several months between the resignation of Louis Rocca and the arrival of Charles Tyndell. Later that year he left the diocese to accept a call to St. John's Church in Newport, Rhode Island. He later left the ministry and was listed in 1942 as working for the Civilian Conservation Corps in Fountain City, Wisconsin. His date and place of death are not known.


 

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