John Cook & Mary Currie

John Cook, ‘from the Isle of Arran’, and his wife Mary Currie are known almost entirely from their deaths.¹ A family tree gives John’s dates as 1775–1837; Mary’s birth year is given there as 1751, which cannot be right for a woman whose daughter was born in 1814, and is probably a slip for about 1781.² They lived in Kilmory parish, at the south end of the island, where their daughter Mary was born in 1814 and — according to the family — their son Alexander, at Laigh Kilmory, in about 1810. Family tradition holds that their farm was Glenree.

In September 1837 they sailed from Greenock on the Minerva with their children Alexander, Mary, Margaret and Finlay and Alexander’s new wife. Typhus reached them in the Southern Ocean. John died at four in the afternoon of 19 December and ‘was buried instantly’ in a stormy sea; Mary died at one the next afternoon ‘and was thrown overboard at 2’. Their daughter Mary followed them on New Year’s morning.³

Who their own parents were is not yet known. The gravestones at Kilmory offer leads: a Donald Currie, tenant in Kildonan (c.1755–1831), and his wife Mary Nicol, of the right age to be Mary Currie’s parents; and an Alexander Cook, tenant in Claynod, whose son Finlay died in the 1780s, of the right age to be John Cook’s father.⁴