May and Sutherland Maxwell and their daughter Mary stand at the heart of the Bahá’í Faith’s formative decades (1923–1952). May’s pilgrimage alongside her adolescent daughter in 1923 inaugurated a lifetime of service: nurturing the burgeoning youth movement in Montreal, teaching and consolidating Bahá’í communities across Canada and the United States through the 1920s and ’30s, and later pioneering French and German assemblies between 1935 and 1937. Mary’s marriage to Shoghi Effendi in 1937—after which she was known as Amatu’l-Bahá Rúḥíyyih Khánum—propelled her into an extraordinary ministry of sacrifice and global outreach.

In Sutherland’s final years, his crowning architectural achievement—the design and supervision of the Shrine of the Báb—ensured his legacy in the Holy Land. Drawing on over 3,000 personal letters, unpublished Tablets, cables from Shoghi Effendi, Rúḥíyyih Khánum’s own notebooks, sketches, photographs, and May’s last Tablet from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, this volume chronicles a family whose devotion, culture, and creativity profoundly shaped the Faith’s expansion and institutional foundations worldwide.