Portfolio

As a child I was fortunate enough to have extensive opportunity to learn the fundamentals of art via private instruction. My classmates and I regularly trained our eyes and hands with various drawing exercises, including contour, blind contour, gesture drawing and capturing negative space. Special attention was paid to noticing value and hue, making color wheels with various media including colored pencil, watercolor, oil and acrylic paints. All of those lessons stayed with me through my life, even though I chose to be educated in the sciences, and gave me a different lens with which to view the world.

My portfolio is where I share my attempts to capture the beauty I find in life.

Genealogy

Like many others, my interest in genealogy was sparked during my freshman year of high school when a semester-long biographical and genealogical project was assigned. In the fourth decade of my life I have restarted my genealogical research, with a new focus on completeness, individual ancestors' stories, my family's place in human history, and our biological connection to the diversity of humankind.

One new and special approach I am able to use is genetic genealogy. Testing through companies such as 23andMe, Family Tree DNA and AncestryDNA is continually enriching the documentation of my family history through showing me previously unknown connections to whole branches of my family tree.

In this section, I will chronicle my investigations into my family's past using paper records, the Internet, and DNA.

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