Harry Brent Mackoy (November 11, 1926)

#0859: Willa Cather to Harry Brent Mackoy, November 11, 1926

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⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ November 11, 1926. My dear Mr. Mackoy¹:

In the first place, let me assure you that I am not even distantly related to Catherine D. Cather³. She is a writer of stories for children, I believe, and married a man⁴ who has the same name as mine and who might possibly be a fiftieth cousin. May I beg you to write the editor of "Onward"⁵ that she is mistaken in her assumption, and ask her please not to give out such a misstatement again. You, as an attorney, realize that such a confusion of identities is always annoying, and that under certain circumstances I might insist upon more than an apology from an editor who makes a statement so flatly untrue.

Very cordially yours, Willa Cather

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let0859.xml
Letter identifier: 0859
Contents: Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
Person to whom letter was written: Harry Brent Mackoy ¹
Date letter was written: November 11, 1926
Place letter was written: New York, New York, United States²
Location of original letter: Mackoy Family Papers, 1784-1943, University of Kentucky, Margaret I. King Library, Lexington, KY

Person Annotations

1882

Mackoy, Harry Brent (1874-1952). American attorney. Born in Covington, KY, son of attorney William Hardia Mackoy and Margaret Brent Mackoy, Harry Mackoy graduated from Yale in 1894 and received his law degree at the University of Cincinnati (OH) College of Law in 1897, entering into partnership with his father. He married Ruth Simrall in 1905 and they had two children. He was active in civic and historical organizations, publishing articles on historical and genealogical subjects and a genealogy of the Langhorne family of Virginia. Cather wrote to him to clarify her (non-)relationship to writer Katherine D. Cather.

1867

Cather, Katherine Dunlap (1877-1926) (“Kittie”). American teacher and writer. Born in Navarre, OH, Katherine Dunlap was the daughter of Felix Dunlap and Elizabeth Crossland Dunlap. Her father died about 1880, her stepfather in 1892; she and her mother and half-brother moved to San Jose, CA, where Katherine Dunlap became a teacher. She married Oliver C. Cather in 1899; widowed in 1903, she began to write, mainly biographical stories for children about the childhoods of famous artists and writers; a manual for teachers, Education Through Story-Telling (1921), has been reprinted. She moved to New York City, where she died; she is buried in San Jose. Willa Cather was annoyed by an assumption that she was related to Katherine D. Cather.

1868

Cather, Oliver C. (1861-1903). American farmer; Cather relative. Born in Indiana, Oliver Cather was one of the nine children of farmer Robert W. Cather, Jr., and Elizabeth Arbagost. Sometime after 1880 he moved to Kern County, CA, near Bakersfield, where he later met teacher Katherine Dunlap. They married in 1899, but he died a few years later. Oliver Cather’s great-grandfather Jasper Cather was Willa Cather’s great-great-grandfather, making them second cousins once removed.

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States

Work Annotations

Onward