BOCA INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY

December 21st, 2011

Hey folks, it is about 3:30 in the wee hours of the morning and I am at it again. I slept for about 3 hours, watched a Netflix show called BONES which is a series I have been working my way through. Then I started to do some more book editing. I can only do about 15 to 20 pages at a time because it is very concentrated work. This book is about 55% completed so I am making good time at it. My editor went through it as well and I am doing the final run.  I spent most of the day working around the apartment trying to get my spring cleaning started early. This way, I will be finished by June 2012. I am also thinking about doing a painting related to the Mayan Calendar and the fact that 2012 is the scheduled end of the world according to their plans. I don't believe it.

My daughter just sent me a photo of her baby bump. Either she is eating too much or she really is pregnant. I am waiting for her to tell me it is okay to publish it. She is a very successful real estate agent in Victoria and each year gets better. She will certainly have her hands full with a baby (or two as some suggest.) Twins run in the family. Her cousin is a twin as are her second cousins.

The Carswell history goes back to about the 1600s as far as I have been able to confirm. History has it that a family known as Carswell settled in a farm known at Duncarnock in the Parish of Mearns around 1650 renting the property. Fifty years later they actually purchased the farm and it is recorded as being the Carswell-owned farm in the 1791 first Statistical Account of Scotland. What confused my research for years was the fact that my great great great grandfather and his brother and two sisters were born in Symington, Ayrshire. James Carswell 1771-1856 and his older brother William 1764-1852 learned their trade most likely apprenticed to their oldest sister's husband, Alexander Gulliland of Kilmarnoock. His wife, Katherine 1751-18?? was the eldest daughter. Their other sister, Agnes, born in 1760 was a spinster from what I have been able to determine. Then it also dawned on me that Ayrshire was just down the road from the Parish of Mearns so it really was not that far away, except in the church books.

So as the story goes, the two brothers,  my ancestor James who did the design and ran the company and his older brother William, who did the hands on work at the building sites, arrived in a blooming Glasgow at just the exact right time. It was 1790 and over the next forty years the population of the city would double. First working as joiners, the guys who connected wood to brick without any nails, they eventually set up on their own and by the 1830s had amassed a fortune in wealth and in respect. They employed 75 men in their company so it was not a small venture. The last of the family-owned holdings that came down our line was sold by my grandfather to provide his spinster sister with an income. My grandfather was that Carswell who had brought the family name to Canada in 1908. 

I always like to say that "we all eventually leave the farm" which in our family happened to be in the late 1700s. It is because of that opportunity so early in our family, that we became educated and continued to educate our young. While none of my father or his two brothers earned a university degree because their education came from WWII, they did attend university courses after the war and were qualified accountants like their uncle and his father before him.

With the birth of my grandchild this coming June, it will signal the start of the next generation in our family. My only hope is that I live long enough to be remembered.