Notes

I was born in Brooklyn in 1990 and raised in California, Ohio, and Florida before settling in Michigan, where I live with my wife in a bungalow built in 1944. I am a collector, a writer, and a family historian.

My mother's family is Hungarian and Transylvanian — the Erdélyi line, out of Nagyvárad in Bihar County, the city that keeps turning up on the walls of this house and in the pages of this site. I have stood in the fortress there. Most of what I work on runs back to that one place in one way or another.

I am not a professional historian, and I don't claim to be one. I am an amateur in the older sense — someone who does this because he loves it — who holds himself to professional standards because the material deserves them. That is what the sourcing and the labelled inferences throughout this site are for.

Three things occupy me. I edited and published my grandfather's unfinished history of the Hunyadi dynasty. I am assembling a documented archive of the family's Hungarian and Transylvanian lines, toward a printed volume. And I collect and catalogue antique prints of the places that history happened in.

The photograph above is of me; the clothing is not. The dress was generated digitally — a tenth-century kit of wool kaftan, fur-trimmed cap, mounted belt and sabre, the costume of the riders in the painting behind every page of this site, the generation that came over the Carpathians and stayed. It seemed worth saying plainly on a site that makes a point of labelling what it knows from what it supposes.

The real thing is a slower project. I am building a díszmagyar — Hungarian noble dress of a much later century — by hand and to period specification. That one will be cloth.