01
Technology · Law · Institutions
Systems & Power
Industrial systems, hidden infrastructure, intelligence history, regulation, and the gap between what institutions promise and what they actually do.
Notebook / no fixed schedule
Follow the connection
far enough.
My interests are broad, but they are rarely separate. Technology, history, engineering, books, family, business, and ordinary life all affect one another. This is where I look at those relationships and the patterns that repeat.
02
History · Michigan · Family
American Inheritance
The founding, territorial Michigan, war, Reconstruction, migration, military service, genealogy, and the patterns one generation hands to the next.
03
Reading · Writing · Research
Books & Craft
The books on the desk, the writers who shaped the work, research that changed a story, and lessons collected while learning a new vocation in public.
04
Music · Sport · The rest of it
Life & Place
Records on the turntable, live performances, Detroit baseball and football, good beer, bourbon, and observations that do not require a professional justification.
Family history
The Cummer and Henderson lines.
The ancestral picture combines both sides of my family. Records add detail by placing particular people in particular times and places.
My ancestral lines include Scottish, English, Irish, Norwegian, other Western European, and Northern Italian ancestry. That background comes through both the Cummer and Henderson families.
Cummer Memoranda, published in 1911, traces the German Kummer line to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the 1730s and then to Canada in 1797. It also records a family tradition that Jacob changed the K to a C because it was easier to mark on his grain bags; the authors could not determine exactly when or why the change occurred.
Randall McKendrick Henderson, my fifth great-grandfather, was born at Killocraw Farm in Killean and Kilchenzie Parish, Argyll, Scotland, in 1769. He married Nancy C. Smith in Tattnall County, Georgia, in 1799 and died there in 1807.
Later generations included Jacob and Wellington Cummer, prominent figures in Michigan's lumbering industry and part of my direct family line. Their names are inscribed at Michigan's Lumberman's Monument.