Liff, Benvie and Invergowrie is a rural parish on the western edge of Dundee straddling both Angus and Perth and Kinross Council territories. The area is best known as the site of the former mental asylum – the Royal Dundee Liff Hospital. The building still stands, but it has been converted into housing. On a personal note, my cousin and her family resided there for over a decade.
Daniel Halkerston rests in the churchyard in Liff Village. His faded, unassuming headstone sits beneath trees, between trunks in a quiet corner of the churchyard. Daniel died on November 6 1918, in nearby Muirhead, aged seventeen, after a ten-day battle with Spanish influenza.
Daniel McKenzie Halkerston was born on January 26 at Thorn Place in the District of Lochee, Dundee. He was the sixth child and fourth son of John, a print compositor, and Mary (nee Matthew). The Census was taken three months after his birth, by which time the Halkerston family were still in Lochee, but had relocated to 249 Blackness Road.
Ten years later, the family had left Dundee City and resided at 110 Klondyke Cottage, Muirend. The family had grown further with the arrival of another son, McKenzie, in Birkhill, 1904 and a daughter, Williamina, in Liff, in 1906. In 1911, Daniel, aged ten, attended school with his elder siblings Mary and James.
As with households across the United Kingdom, the war was to bestow much grief upon the Halkerston family. On April 23 1917, Daniel’s eldest brother, John, was killed in action at Hermies, Pas-de-Calais, aged twenty-six. Nearly a year later, his brother William died on the Somme on April 2. Both are buried in war cemeteries in France, though they are commemorated on the headstone in Liff and the nearby War Memorial. The Halkerston family were not unique in having the Spanish Flu Pandemic add to the war-related grief. Daniel was employed as an apprentice seedsman when he died. His father was present when he died and registered his death.
In 1921, John and Mary lived in Ivy Cottage, Liff, with their eldest daughter, Marjory and their two youngest children. John, aged fifty-five, was still employed as a compositor and Linotype operator with acclaimed Dundee-based printer and publisher, DC Thomson.
In 1923, John and Mary emigrated to the USA, departing from Liverpool on October 23 and sailing to New York on the Cunard Line’s Carmania. After arriving, they travelled north to Boston, Massachusetts. They would later settle in Springfield, Hampden County, where they remained for the rest of their lives. John died on May 13 1932, aged sixty-six. Mary survived him by two years, dying on July 2, 1934. Both were interred in Oak Grove Cemetery. The headstone in Liff, marking the resting place of Daniel and immortalising John Jr and William, was commissioned and erected after John Sr’s death.
Sources: Ancestry, Find a Grave, Scotland’s People
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