Geordie Ker(r)
George "Geordie" Ker or Kerr was, like his brother, William, eight years his junior, the son of John Kerr, mathematics lecturer and later professor. He would also be, again like his brother, a Scotland international, indeed five times over, scoring, as a forward, ten goals for his country, including a hat-trick and three braces over just two seasons.
He was born in 1860 in Partick, his father from Saltcoats and his mother Irish. But by 1871 the family had moved to Cathkin in the city's southern suburbs. And it was there he learned his football as a young teenager with Kerland, a Crosshill team, so south of the Clyde, Alexandra Athletic, a junior club from Dennistoun, so north of the the river and at seventeen in 1877 joining Queen's Park, by then playing at the first Hampden.
With him in the team The Spiders were to win successive Scottish Cups in 1880, he scoring in the final, 1881 and 1882, he scoring once more. However, at twenty-two, he working as an Iron Merchant, injury forced effective to retirement from the game and led to his emigration. William in 1881 had left for the USA, first to Pennsylvania as a Bell telephone company manager on the East Coast in and then to farm, still in association with a certain Alexander Graham Bell, on the other side of the country, in Yakima in Washington State. Meantime Geordie too had in 1884 headed west, via Pennsylvania to Texas to learn cattle herding and then in 1886 joining his brother's and Bell's business. Indeed, whilst William would return east to Washington D.C. to live out the rest of his life, Geordie, continuing to work for Bell, would buy his own farm and remain, with a couple of years in Alaska, in Moxee by Yakima for his.
And there he would twice marry. His first wife, the wedding in 1892, he recorded as a Rancher, would be Mary Wheeler. Her father was a military man. She had been born in West Point in New York State and Geordie and she would have one son. But Mary was at the age of fifty-four to pass away in 1915 to be buried in North Carolina, her parents' birth-place. Geordie then remained a widower for six years but clearly entered into another relationship, which would result in a second marriage just before his death. His bride was the widow ,Julia Waldrip nee Johnson, and a lawyer to trade. They would wed in Olympia in late 1921, he passing away back in Moxee just two months later in February 1922 on his sixty-second birthday adn there to be buried.
Birth Locator:
1860 - 7, Hillhead Place, Partick, Glasgow
Residence Locations:
1861 - 9, Great Kelvin Terrace, Partick, Glasgow
1871 - 2, Cathkin Terrace, Cathcart, Glasgow
1881 - 167, Hill St., Barony, Glasgow
1892 - North Yakima, Washington State, USA
1901 - N/A
1910 - Moxee, Yakima, Washington State, USA
1920 - Riverside, Yakima, Washington, USA
1922 - Moxee, Yakima, Washington State, USA
Death Locator:
1922 - Moxee, Yakima, Washington State, USA
Grave Locator:
Tahoma Cemetery, Yakima, Washington, USA
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