The Stirling Old Town Cemetery has been a burial site for centuries. Soldiers, clergymen, even slavers rest here, overshadowed by the muscular tower of the Church of the Holy Rude, it’s walls peppered with dimples from cannon balls from the many conflicts it has survived. Spanish flu victims also rest in this cemetery.
Margaret Clark and and her daughter Jean McKinlay McAree lie in a familial grave, both dying on the 13th of February 1919. Margaret succumbed to complications two days after contracting influenza at home aged fifty-five. Hours later Jean died in Stirling Royal Infirmary. aged thirty, pneumonia was recorded as the cause of death. It cannot be proved, but there is a likely probability that this was caused by influenza.
Double-barreled bereavements such as this were all too common during the Spanish flu pandemic. The grief endured by husband and father James McAree and his surviving offspring would have been agonising. James survived his wife and daughter for just short of nineteen years, dying in November 1937.
Broken Columns 