I was born in Liverpool, England, in 1951, the youngest of three children. We emigrated to Alberta in 1954 and lived in Edmonton and environs for several years before moving to Calgary where I began grade 2 and in 1969 graduated from Henry Wise Wood High School, then going on to the University of Calgary thanks to a scholarship for children of employees of Canadian Fina Oil Company. I began theological study and eventually graduated Bachelor of Divinity from the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. We then returned to Canada where I was engaged in pastoral work for a few years, along with part-time study for the Master of Theology at Emmanuel College. By the time I graduated I was already in the PhD programme in Scottish history at the University of Guelph. Upon completion of the doctorate in 1985, done with the inestimable aid of a generous scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, I returned to pastoral work for three years before earning my Bachelor of Education from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. I thought my future lay in teaching junior high school students, but at the last minute I received an offer of a one-year sabbatical replacement at the University College of Cape Breton in Sydney, Nova Scotia. One year turned into 27 and 1/2 years, ending with retirement on 31 December 2016. At that time my wife Arlene also retired as Registrar of Cape Breton University. We moved back to the West and now reside in St Albert, Alberta, a northern suburb on the periphery of Edmonton. We are members of Holy Family Parish, and are happy to live close to our only child, Joel, his wife Deborah, and their three children, Edmund, Annabelle, and Florence. I continue to research and write on early-modern Scotland and France, and am looking forward to applying for another research grant in 2023.
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