As Hugh McColl Jr. forged his prosperous path through the corporate world, he often wondered about his family's beginnings, from Scotland to small-town South Carolina. He knew the stories would one day disappear, and he set out to capture them.

The book that resulted, "From the Highlands to High Finance: The Carolina McColls," was a decade in the making. Spanning 16 centuries of history, it details the family's challenges and contributions - and how they ultimately shaped the businessman who built Bank of America.

"There were high expectations, which is still a family trait," the former chief executive told the Observer during a recent interview in his 51st floor office in Bank of America Corporate Center uptown. Ancestors achieved; "ergo, one should."

McColl, 77, collaborated with writer and historian Suzanne Cameron Linder Hurley on the 250-page volume, which traces the McColl clan's story from a fourth-century Irish king to the present day.

There is the account of a distant relative who became the family's first banker in 1773, when the Church of Scotland at Port Appin voted to allocate part of its treasury to him so it could draw interest. And there's the story of Bennettsville, S.C.'s Duncan D. McColl Sr., who played a critical role in rebuilding his community after the Civil War, lending money to merchants and mobilizing other businessmen to organize the Bank of Marlboro in 1884.

The book also tells Hugh McColl Jr.'s own story. McColl, the great-grandson of Duncan McColl, engineered a series of mergers and acquisitions that built Charlotte's Bank of America Corp. into what is now the nation's second-largest bank by assets.

McColl began trying to trace his family's history about 15 years ago, he said, and later turned his findings over to Hurley, a Marlboro County, S.C., native who has known McColl for years, for additional study. She and her husband, F. Jack Hurley - a historian whose photos of the Scottish hills and Carolina countryside illustrate the book - made several trips to Scotland for the research.

They visited a mountaintop that housed the earliest McColl cemetery, pored through wills and state inventories in Edinburgh and, back home, visited courthouses and archives and examined the McColl family's own letters and records, said Hurley, who has written 10 books.

The research yielded other projects: In 2008, Hurley published "Dearest Hugh: The Courtship Letters of Gabrielle Drake and Hugh McColl, 1900-1901," a collection of love letters between the current Hugh McColl's grandparents.

Two years later, she edited a second book, letters between McColl's parents, for family members, she said. Now Hurley is working on another, involving Civil War-era letters from the Thomas family, McColl relatives.

"From the Highlands to High Finance" is largely a chronicle of one family's history, but it might have a broader appeal, Hurley said. The first part of the book applies to all McColls or McCalls who can trace their families to Appin, Scotland, and their experiences are likely similar to other families with Scottish heritage, she said.

Many people in the Carolinas today are of Scottish descent. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, thousands of Scots moved to the region, Hurley wrote in the book's introduction.

"Everything they went through would apply to anyone," she said. "That's something I don't think has been written about: What was their life like?"

The rest of the book focuses on life in America in the formative years between the American Revolution and Civil War, and the post-war recovery of the New South. For history or banking buffs, it also sheds some light on what influenced one of today's most accomplished business leaders.

McColl, who funded the project and read the chapters as they were being written, said his family's background in finance, high-achieving ancestors and plenty of prodding from his mother and grandmother - two strong women - led to his career path and success, though he didn't realize it until he was older.

"I was much loved, and of course you could argue, much instructed," he said. "It gave me a lot of confidence."

Now, McColl hopes the book will inspire his eight grandchildren and generations to come.

"The past shapes us," he said, "whether we know it or not."