James was born about 1745.  This Carnegie was a weaver, and also, during dull weaving seasons, a tiller of soil.  Like most of his descendents he was a political firebrand.  As a young man, James Carnegie left the ancestral Forfarshire and established himself in Fife.  In Scottish legal phrase, he "feued"(roughly leased) a piece of land in the new weavers settlement of Pattiemuir, a hamlet about two miles south of Dunfermline and about 1/10mile north of Limekins. [Nancy C. Rockefeller "The Carnegies and Cumberland Island"]