Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

The photos from the previous posts gave me a ‘window’ to examine a mysterious wedding photo in my mother’s collection. It is the photo of my father when he was about 11-12 years old, in other words, 1926-1928. It is a wedding photo that shows some of my father’s cousins, his uncle, his auntie, his grandmother, and his parents. I don’t know who the bride and groom are.

My grandparents in Edinburgh had large families. But it seems to be a Harkness – perhaps the son of my father’s uncle? But there are too many ‘unknowns’ here to carry out further investigations. The only hope is to post the photo online and hope that a relative also possesses the same photo and has more information.  

My mother often wrote notes on the backside of our family photos. She has not written any notes about this wedding photo of my father’s family. Maybe it was because she knew very little about my father’s family.

My Father’s Pride

My father seemed proud of his connection with Sir Peter Heatly, the Scottish world champion diver.⁷ He is his ‘nephew’ on his maternal side of the family. 

Also as mentioned, he would boast of his ancestry from the Spanish aristocracy when in his cups. He pointedly claimed that he descended from the Spanish aristocracy, or more precisely, the descendance from the men of the ships of the Spanish armada that were shipwrecked in the Orkney islands (his family crew members of the Spanish armada ships shipwrecked near the Orkney Islands – that is, his family had roots in the Orkney Islands). 

In other words, he was more interested in the ‘romantic’ ideas of his family and ancestry, but less concerned about the details of practical reality. Thus, he left my mother in the dark regarding who everyone in his family photos were (which she archived).

Ironically, we now know more about my mother’s photos of her husband’s family than she did, and this is many decades later! Why do we know this? By the simple system of cross-referencing various photos. 

Dissecting the Photo

As the man I have pointed out as my grandfather, Alexander Whitecross Harkness, appears to be the same person in the so-called ‘gunboat photo’ shown elsewhere here. The fact that my grandfather passed away in 1928 further supports the idea that this wedding occurred in 1928, or some years before his death. In the picture, the woman to the left of my father (who was about 11 or 12 years old,  standing to the right of the photo in shorts)⁸ looks a lot like his mother.

Perhaps, this is a sister and the grandmother of Sir Peter Heatly. In addition, the photo of my father’s uncle Jimmy and his grandmother shows his cousin Jimmy with a receding hairline. Two men in the picture resemble ‘Jimmy’ with receding hairlines—thus, his cousins; however, I haven’t verified this guess concerning age and other factors. But rather than spending so much time ‘surmising,’ I will post the picture online, using the right ‘tags.’ Some other family members might be able to shed some light on this mystery. Most likely, this family wedding photo is probably also in the possession of some extended family members. 

A wild guess would be that the wedding is the marriage of Robert Heatly to Margaret Sproull in 1924. Robert Heatly was the nephew of my grandmother Georgina Harkness (m.sn. Hume). But this would mean that my father would be only 8 or 9 years old, whereas he appears to be a little older in the photo. On the other hand, looking back, this may be a correct guess because he was proud of his connection with Sir Peter Heatly (and thus kept the photo). But of course, this is merely a theory that can be clarified if I upload the picture online with ‘tags’. 

I included the Heatly’s family tree and Sir Peter Heatly’s birth certificate elsewhere. I won’t discuss Georgina Harkness’s (m.sn. Hume) family tree here. My grandmother Georgina was the sister of Rebecca Heatly (m.sn. Hume), Sir Peter Heatly’s grandmother. Georgina’s family tree will be discussed in the SECOND PART (1916-1940).

Another confusing element, or rather two confusing elements, is that the bride seems to resemble my grandmother, and the groom, my father’s cousins! My father had at least one more uncle called Willie. So the marriage could be that of one of his sons. I did a brief search on ScotlandsPeople for weddings but had no luck. But this is perhaps due to my ignorance of Scottish geography. Between 1923 and 1928, I found 79 hits for ‘Harkness marriage’ on ScotlandsPeople.

It is very likely the marriage took place in Edinburgh. However, the RD names in ScotlandsPeople are ‘vague’ to an uninformed person. You must search each RD name to determine if it is in Edinburgh or not. In other words, this is all a very inexact science. So I or someone else (preferably someone else, haha ☺, as my stamina is running low) will look into this in the future.

James’s email about the wedding photo

In writing to my second cousin James Whitecross Harkness he informed me of the following:

“Margaret is the daughter of Florence who was a daughter of William Harkness (your grandfather Alexander’s brother ). Margaret has told me that there was also another brother called Harry and a sister called Margaret, so William and Isabella Harkness had 4 sons and a daughter.”

In other words, the ‘mysterious’ wedding photo could also be related to these five siblings – in other words, complicated!

⁸ He is wearing short trousers which suggests he is younger than 13; British boys started to wear long trousers at the age of 13. He seems to be wearing a school tie suggesting that he had started attending Herriot’s Grammar school making him 11 or 12 years old. Thus, it seems a reasonable bet that this wedding photo was taken in 1927 or 1928. But of course, it is difficult to see from the photo exactly how old he is – he could be as young as 8 or 10 placing the photo in a 1924-1928 time-frame.