Hugh Wilson would spend sixty years of his life in Dumbarton, more than thirty years of that at the same address. And by his death that same house had become the home of his son, also called Hugh. But he was not born in the town. He had moved from Ayrshire's Mauchline in about 1883, a year that would quietly prove very significant for "The Sons" and a place that would remain integral for Wilson. 

The pivotal event was a marriage. It took place on Mauchlin'e High St. between a box-maker, Thomas McMillan, a widower, and a widowed worker in a box-works, Margaret Watt, known by her married name as Margaret Wilson. She was Hugh Wilson's mother. And the event seems to have been, for reasons we can never know, a catalyst. Following it three young men moved from the Ayrshire town to Dumbartonshire, indeed to Dumbarton himself. Hugh Wilson with his wife and two children was one, he a wood-turner, who would find work in the shipyards. The others were nineteen year-old Tom and elder brother at twenty-one John MacMillan or McMillan. Thomas McMillan, widower, was their father. The MacMillans and Wilson were step-brothers.  

Hugh Wilson was by then already twenty-six. He had been born not as reported elsewhere in 1859 but in 1857 and by the time of the move had already played extensively for his home-town club starting in 1877 at twenty. In 1878 he had been in its team that had won the first Ayrshire Cup. He would appear for the Scotch Counties on several occasions and with that pedigree he went straight into Dumbarton's first team at half-back alongside Leitch Keir, where he was to be followed by none other than the younger McMillan. And when in 1885 Keir had to drop out against Wales, with Dumbarton's Michael Paton as captain, Wilson stepped up for a first and only cap. Scotland won 8-1 away. Joe Lindsay, also from Dumbarton, hit a hat-trick. 

Hugh Wilson and his Ayrshire-born wife, also Margaret, would have two more Dumbarton-born children and by 1901 have moved into the house that would become more or less his permanent home. However, in 1903 tragedy would strike with the death of Maggie at the age of just forty-six at the McMillan/Wilson parental home back in Mauchline. But he soon remarried, in 1904, and again there not in Dunbartonshire. His bride was Annie McRory or MacRorie and she returned to live with him in Dumbarton, bringing up the three Wilson children remaining at home. It would be the second of the four Hugh Wilson marriages recorded on his death certificate. The last would be in 1932 when he would be seventy-five, took place in Dumbarton and his bride was Janet Adam, a mere fifty-three with in between there said to have been a third, to a Janet Hamilton. 

And, indeed, that third marriage did take place. In March 1931 in Govanhill Jane not Janet Hamilton, aged sixty, was married to Hugh Wilson of Dumbarton. The ceremony was at her home on Cathcart Rd., the couple moved to Dumbarton and that was where she died in October of the same year. And there are twists; two of them. Firstly, Jane Hamilton's maiden-name was McMillan. An Ayrshire-born John McMillan was her father. Moreover, her mother's maiden name was McRory, Ann McRory from Mauchline, the couple actually marrying there. Hugh Wilson's third wife was probably his second wife's cousin and possibly Tom McMillan's also. The second is that there seems to be but one record of the death of an Annie McRory, Hugh's second wife. It is coincidently or not in Cathcart once more, at the Victoria Infirmary but not until 1932, by which time she is seventy-seven and he had moved on not once but twice. In fact, whilst his third marriage would last just seven months, he would spend twelve years more with Janet, his fourth wife, dying, as correctly recorded, in Dumbarton in 1946 at the age of eighty-nine, probably t be buried in Dumbarton Cemetery.