No special claims can be made on behalf of William Francis Caldbeck except the fact that his personal account-book for the years 1844-60 has survived and affords an unusually clear picture of the early career of a very typical practitioner during what, for Ireland, were still the formative years of the organized profession of architecture. Of his remoter antecedents nothing is known, though it is tempting to wonder whether William Caldbeck, mason, employed at Trinity College, Dublin, in about 1712 was some kind of forebear.