I am a fulltime bookseller (online) from the historic village of Williamstown, Ontario, Canada at the heart of Glengarry County, a historic Highland settlement and the most written-about county in Canada.
My reading and interests centre around topics relating to our part of Eastern Ontario, halfway distant from Montreal and Ottawa and close to upstate New York at the Massena-Cornwall border crossing and Mohawk reserve of Akwesasne which straddle the tripartite junction of Ontario-Quebec-New York.
We live as licenced tenants of the Ontario Heritage Trust (Toronto) since 1990 in the Bethune-Thompson House, named after the Rev. John Bethune (1751-1815) military chaplain of the Royal Highland Emigrant Regiment during the Rev War and progenitor of the China surgeon-hero Dr Norman Bethune. The next, David Thompson, the astronomer mapmaker of the North West Company, lived here with his Métis wife Charlotte Small for what he called "the twenty happiest years of his life." (1815-1835) Here he delineated the US-Canada boundary in 1818 following the Treaty of Ghent that terminated the War of 1812.
My interests are: local history, especially the fur trade, United Empire Loyalists, Scottish Highland and Jacobite history, Samuel Johnson & James Boswell, the Scottish Enlightenment (esp. Adam Smith), Mohawk language and Gaelic language. I am literate in French and Portuguese and have degrees in chemistry and philosophy.
Having edited some reference texts, I am devoted to the standards of the Chicago Manual of Style, and use it when faced with style violations on Wikipedia.
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