Hello, my name is John Robert. A lot of folks call me "J. R.". These days I live in Menlo Park, California. If you can find and afford a place to live here, the living is easy, pleasant, and even relatively safe. I took this picture of myself while sitting outside my favorite local cafe on a winter day.

There are many things about this family history research project that I find amazing.

I was quite stunned several years ago to find a database accessible through the internet that has translations of Boynton-related documents from as far back as the 1100s. You have to know where to look, but anyone with internet access can read these, any time of the day or night.

The English have kept a lot of records, for a long time. In the 1800s, they published a lot of these in very large volumes. I find it amazing that the University of Iowa library has such a good collection of these.

I was also rather amazed that you can walk into various libraries and archives in England and hold in your hands documents from the 1100s. Many were written on very small pieces of "paper" (made from cow-hide, I believe), and then folded up. A document that's been folded up for -- oh, 800 years, or so -- is hard to unfold!

Our first experience with these very old documents was at the Durham Cathedral Archive, where we were allowed to photograph the documents ourselves. The photographs here give you a taste of what it was like. We spent a good part of a day looking for documents and photographing them. The handwriting is difficult to read, but we got pretty good at recognizing "de Boynton".

In addition to family history, my interests these days include web publishing, book publishing, typography, type design, reading, old movies at the Stanford Theater, and the simple pleasures of Menlo Park: bookstores, cafes, redwood trees, beautiful weather, access to San Francisco and the ocean, etc.

My personal website is mostly about web publishing and usability.