Leitch Keir, in his prime perhaps the greatest of Dumbarton's players, was another not born in the town but from a family drawn to it by a booming, local economy. His father, another who worked in the local shipyards as a Ships Plater, as his son would after him, was born in Saline, a Fife village just north of Dunfermline, and his mother in Alloa. And it was in Alloa that Leitch was born, in 1861.

However, the family soon moved first to Anderston in Glasgow and by 1881, he by then aged twenty, from there to Dumbarton. It is therefore uncertain where he learned his football, in Glasgow or Dumbarton itself, but it was also in 1881 that he first took the field for the town club, having initially played at junior level with Renton. It would be the first of sixteen seasons with The Sons, thirteen in the First Team, in which he won the Scottish Cup once, losing in the final twice more, the Scottish League title twice, tied in its inaugural season, outright in its second, and four caps, all in winning sides. In that time he forged at club-level half-back partnerships, both two- and three-man, with Peter Miller, briefly Willie Lang, Tom McMillan, Geordie Dewar, Dickie Boyle, Alex Miller and more and at national level with Bob Kelso, John Auld and James Kelly.

Meantime, Keir had in 1889 in Rhu married Christina Miller, born in Bowling, so between Dumbarton and Old Kilpatrick. They were to have five children, three girls and two boys. And he even after football fame seems to have quietly lived out the rest of his days at two addresses just off Dumbarton's High St. , simply a background part of the town's history. His death would be at the second and relatively young in 1922,, a week after his sixtieth birthday. He is thought to be buried in the town's cemetery. Christina would outlive him, passing still in Dumbarton in 1942 aged eighty.