In 1861 at Bolitho Farm, on the outskirts of Liskeard, John Carswell was the farmer of 165 acres employing four workers. Dairymaid Ann Hoar, Carter Thomas Welch and Housemaid Frances Tamblyn, all lived-in at the farm. Farmer’s wife Emmaline Carswell, at the age of 30, was 11 years younger than her husband and had given birth to their first child, a son named John Raby Carter, in March 1861. More children followed: Jane in 1863, Elizabeth in 1864 and Charles in 1866.

Farmer John Carswell died on June 5, 1867, aged only 47, and Emmaline moved to the spacious No 1 Tremeddan Terrace with her four children. She must have been comfortably off, as her income from annuities enabled her to employ a live-in Domestic Servant; in 1871 that was the 22-year-old unmarried Jane Goldsworthy.

At only 10 years old John was despatched to the Corporation Grammar School in Plymouth as a Boarder. After school he sailed to South America to seek his fortune, along with many others in the Great Cornish Emigration of the 19th century. John found work at a saltpetre (nitric acid used as a fertiliser) mine at Iquique in Peru. Sadly, he died there on May 20, 1881 aged only 20.

Moving forward to May 1905, the boys in the photograph are thought to be Donald Harmston Matheson and Frank Stuart Matheson who were living at No 1 Tremeddan Terrace with their father Frank, an Accountant in a local bank, their mother Charlotte Elizabeth, sister Charlotte Mary and domestic servant Amelia Welsh. Frank junior later became the treasurer, then president of Liskeard Old Cornwall Society.

By Brian Oldham, museum volunteer and Bard of the Gorsedh Kernow