Meantime in 1891 he married locally. His bride was Mary McLachlan, who had actually been born in the Ballarat goldfields of Australia. They would have seven children, all boys, with six surviving infancy, the youngest of whom would be seventeen on the death of their father in 1921. He would, aged sixty-three, collapse on a tram on the way home from a round of golf and be buried at Hawkhead Cemetery just outwith Paisley. Mary would outlive him by sixteen years dying still in the town in 1937 and be buried alongside him with the boy they had lost as a baby and another another of the sons, who died as a teenager.