My research considers the identities, families, and legacies of Canadian Protestant missionaries who worked in the foreign missionary field in the early to mid-twentieth century. I do this by focusing on three missionary women and their families: the Kilborns, the Cunninghams, and Florence Murray. I use a close reading of letters, informed by feminist and queer theories, to ascertain the lived experiences of these missionaries. In highlighting these missionaries’ lives over the duration of their careers I demonstrate the varied motivations for entering, staying, and leaving the missionary field and how their lives conformed to and/or challenged gender, family, and labour norms as representatives of Christian Canada abroad. In doing so, I challenge how national narratives of Canadian work abroad, best exemplified in the legacy of doctors like Norman Bethune, obscure the more common, but equally complex and contradictory, lifestyles of everyday missionary families and what it meant to be a Canadian foreign missionary.