By Kay McMeekin with cooperation of his descendants.
John Kay was born in Cumnock in 1856 to John Kay and Jean Thomson (More of the Thomson family elsewhere)
He became a tailor in Liverpool and married a widow Ellen Charlotte Jackson widow of Charles Thomas Laidman. She had two little girls Helen and Alice. John and Ellen had a daughter Frances Mary and they emigrated on the Australia to New York arriving in September 1884. They were heading for Cincinnati, Ohio where Ellen's sister Frances and their mother were living in 1880 census. They fetched up in Americus, Georgia by the 1900 census. John Kay was not with his wife and family. He was a tailor's merchant, a boarder, in Pueblo, Pueblo, Colorado.
John went missing in January of 1910 for a few days as seen in newspaper reports in the Austin American Statesman. No reporting of how or where he turned up again has been found yet.
The WW1 story as related by his grandson-in-law James Beard:
During the First World War, there was no mass media. The British government paid people in the US to give lectures on what was happening on the Western Front. Probably with a decidedly British slant.
Papa Kay was born in 1856 in Cumnock, Scotland and had been in the British army as a young man in the 1870s and attached to a cartographic unit. The Kay family moved from Britain in the 1880s to Americus, Georgia. The Kays moved to Austin, Texas in the mid 1890s. Mr. Kay operated a tailoring shop in downtown Austin.
The British Government in 1915 paid £1 British pound a month to the men giving lectures about the War. A pound was worth about $5 in those days, and Papa Kay, being a good Scotsman, was not going to let that money slip away! To put this amount in perspective, the best paying industrial job at the time was $5 for an 8-hour shift at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. Or about 63 cents an hour. So, $5 for a few hours a month was pretty good!
When Mr. Kay gave a lecture, he would draw a map so people could visualize the troop movements better. After the war was over, he gathered as much information as he could and created a 20-foot by 40-foot map. One inch equals one mile.
Two Aerodromes are delineated, Orly, just north of Paris, and one near Amiens. The red lines are railroads (I know after a visit here by an officer of the French Consulate in Houston, Texas. He could not believe how accurate the map was.)
Please note that all the hospitals are outside the city of Paris. Well, it turns out the so called "Spanish Flu" that supposedly broke out in 1918, was actually killing French soldiers in the trenches in 1916! The French government was afraid of the flu spreading to the civilian population, so they placed the hospitals outside the city. Well, that actually helped the guys, because the Spanish flu attacked the respiratory system and Paris was heated with coal at the time and the air in the city was full of smoke. With the hospitals outside the city, the guys got fresh air and sunshine!
Remarkable War Map. Copied from The London Times March 31, 1925 from a hand written copy of the newspaper article....the only name on the letter is "Sara"...Perhaps some friend or relative in Great Britain?
(from a correspondent)
In the shop of an Austin merchant tailor, hangs one of the most remarkable maps in existence. It tells the whole story of the Great War, so accurate is it in detail, so perfect in workmanship and so valuable (illegible word) a historical document, that it is destined to become a treasured national possession.
The creator of the map is John Kay, a graduate of Glasgow University*. John for many years carried on the profession of a mining engineer. From day to day, he received every item of War news circulated by the Associated Press of America. He obtained all the official documents that were available. He followed every detail of the War Dispatches in "The Times".
The result is a map measuring 40 feet by 20 feet. There are more than 72,000 names inscribed upon it. There is not a road in France that is not indicated. Every line of trenches is marked. Wherever the American forces were fighting, there is a flag. The fortunes of the American forces can be followed from the moment they landed in England or in France, to the positions they occupied at the Armistice. There is a white cross where the first American soldier fell. There is a careful chart of the Battle of Jutland. The sinking of the (HMS) Hampshire is marked as is the place where the Lusitania was torpedoed, accompanied by the statement, "This brought us into the war."
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Obituary on newspapers.com
Obit found by Joanne Ferguson
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