Jasper John Boswell was an English genealogist, family historian, soldier, and merchant who compiled The History and Genealogical Tables of the Boswells (1906). Born in Norwich in 1834, he was the third son of James Boswell and Mary Ann Storey, belonging to a Norwich family that he sought to trace from the Yorkshire Boswells of Stainton and Clifton (Genealogy 36NP in Volume II of his history). He was educated at Sherborne Grammar School in Dorset until 1848, when he was briefly apprenticed to his uncle William Boswell, a carver, gilder, and picture dealer in Norwich who later served for sixteen years as an alderman of the city.
In 1849, at the age of fifteen, Boswell left his apprenticeship and enlisted in the British Army, joining the headquarters of the 86th (Royal County Down) Regiment of Foot at Deesa in the Bombay Presidency late that year. He served for ten years in India and Aden. At the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny in 1857, his regiment was recalled from Aden to Bombay, deployed initially in detachments, and then united at Dhar as part of Major-General Sir Hugh Rose's Central India Field Force, marching and fighting from Bombay to Gwalior until the campaign concluded. Upon the regiment's return to England in 1859, he left the army and entered the wine trade with the firm of Boswell and Baxter.
In 1864 he married Isabella Schofield, head governess of the Norwich and Norfolk Training Institute and daughter of William Schofield of Kirkstall, Yorkshire. Settling in Leeds, he established a successful wholesale wine and spirit business in partnership with his brother-in-law Charles Schofield. By his first wife, who died in 1876 at Horsell, Surrey, he had five children, including his eldest daughter Gertrude Boswell (1867-1956), who married in 1898 the Italian banker and mountaineer Gaudenzio Sella (1860-1934) of San Gerolamo, Biella, Piedmont (nephew of Quintino Sella, first Finance Minister of the united Kingdom of Italy, buried at the Sanctuary of Oropa near Biella; in the later typescript transcription of Volume II, p. 174, "Sella" and "Oropa" are misread from the manuscript as "Pella" and "Europa"). In 1877 Boswell married secondly Sarah Jane Baxendale of Sowerby Bridge, Yorkshire, by whom he had five further children, including Captain James Baxendale Boswell of Leeds and Jessie Boswell (1881-1956), who joined her half-sister Gertrude in Piedmont and became a noted modernist painter in the Gruppo dei Sei of Turin. Around 1878 Boswell purchased an estate of nearly forty acres at Hanworth Park in Middlesex with the intention of retiring, though heavy building commitments and the difficulties of his bankers forced the transfer of his business on unfavourable terms. He died in 1912.
Because both men shared the initials "J. J. Boswell" and served in India in the 1850s, library catalogues have frequently confused Jasper John Boswell with his Scottish contemporary and correspondent Major-General John James Boswell, C.B. (1835-1908) of Darnlee, Melrose (Bengal Staff Corps, grandson of William Boswell, Advocate). In Volume II of The History and Genealogical Tables of the Boswells (Chapter XXXVI, pp. 173-174, and p. 206), Jasper John Boswell gives his own autobiographical notice and explicitly credits "General John James Boswell, C.B. of Melrose" as a separate correspondent who supplied him with Scottish press notices.
Over several decades, Jasper John Boswell collected public records, heralds' visitations, parish registers, wills, charters, and family manuscripts across Yorkshire, Scotland, and England to compile The History and Genealogical Tables of the Boswells, an ambitious two-volume chronicle of the Bosville and Boswell families.
Volume I (covering Chapters I-XII and Genealogies 1-12, from the Norman Conquest through the Yorkshire houses of Conisbrough, Ardsley, Gunthwaite, and Newhall, and the early Scottish lairds of Balgregie and Balmuto) was privately printed in folio in 1906 with a separate sixteen-page alphabetical Index. Volume II (covering Chapters XIII-XL and Genealogies 13-39, completed in manuscript around 1906-1907) remained unpublished at his death in 1912; the original manuscript and research papers were preserved by his daughter Gertrude Sella-Boswell at the Monastero di San Gerolamo in Biella and are today housed in the Boswell-Sella archive at the Fondazione Sella in Biella, Italy, from which photocopies were later transcribed into typescript. Volume II documents the later Yorkshire and Scottish branches, including the houses of Auchinleck, Knockroon, Craigstoun, and Balmuto.
Like many amateur genealogical compilations of the late Victorian and Edwardian era, Boswell's work must be used with caution: its early medieval chapters rely on conjectural links to construct an unbroken descent from "Sieur de Bosville" at the Battle of Hastings (1066) and to connect the Yorkshire Bosvilles directly to the Scottish Boswells and to the author's own Norwich line, while its biographical sketch of James Boswell repeats several nineteenth-century errors derived from Charles Rogers's Boswelliana (1874). Nevertheless, Chapter XXIII of Volume II preserves valuable documentary material, including transcripts of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century family memorials composed by James Boswell, 7th Laird of Auchinleck and Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, extracts from the 1776 Auchinleck deed of entail in the General Register House in Edinburgh, a firsthand description of the grounds, caves, and castle ruins at Auchinleck from Jasper John Boswell's own visit to the estate, and a personal letter to the author from Sir Alexander Boswell's daughter Margaret Emilia Vassall recounting her father's deathbed statement at Balmuto following his fatal 1822 duel with James Stuart of Dunearn.
- The History and Genealogical Tables of the Boswells: Their Ancient Alliances and Connections from the Founder of the Name in the Year 1066 to This Date 1906 (Vol. I and Index privately printed, 1906; Vol. II manuscript preserved at the Fondazione Sella, Biella, Italy, and later transcribed).