Mackintosh MacKay

MacKay’s birthplace at Edrachillis Bay

Very Rev Mackintosh MacKay LLD (1793-1873) was a Scottish minister and author who served as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland in 1849. He wrote one of the first Gaelic dictionaries in 1828.

Life

The grave of Very Rev Mackintosh MacKay, Duddingston Kirkyard
The memorial to Mackintosh MacKay, Grange Cemetery, Edinburgh

He was born on 18 November 1793 at Duardbeg on Edrachillis Bay in Sutherland, one of seven children to Cpt Alexander Mackay and his wife Helen.[1] He was first minister of Laggan then transferred to the far larger parish of Dunoon.

He was one of the many ministers who split from the established Church of Scotland in the Disruption of 1843. In 1849 he succeeded Very Rev Patrick Clason of Buccleuch Church as Moderator of the General Assembly. The Assembly was held at Tanfield Hall in Canonmills.[2]

In the early 1850s he travelled to Australia to spread the views of the Free Church. He spent his first years in Melbourne. In May 1856 he became minister of St Georges Church in Sydney, being responsible for its first permanent purpose-built church in 1860.[3] Returning to Scotland in the 1860s he spent his final years preaching in Tarbert on the Isle of Harris.

He died in Portobello, Edinburgh on 17 May 1873. He is buried in Duddingston Kirkyard in south Edinburgh. The grave lies against the western boundary wall.

A second memorial stands in the Grange Cemetery in south Edinburgh, east of the eastern path next to the large obelisk to Christian Isobel Johnstone.

Publications

References

  1. ↑ https://www.geni.com/people/Mackintosh-Mackay-Rev-Dr/6000000024771995279
  2. ↑ http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/2nd-june-1849/4/scotland
  3. ↑ http://www.stgeorgespcea.org.au/about.html
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