The family tree.

In the summer of 2026 I started researching my family history, with the idea of eventually turning it into a book for my kids. The rule from the start has been simple: nothing goes in the tree unless I have the original record. Most family trees online are copied from other family trees; this one is built from about 1,600 original documents — baptisms, marriages, census pages, draft cards, passenger lists, newspaper clippings — and at its deepest it now reaches back twelve generations, to Jacques Badeau and Anne Ardouin, married in 1630 at Marennes, on the Atlantic coast of France.

A few highlights: a pencil portrait of my grandfather drawn in Tokyo in 1953, now in the Library of Congress; a 1713 marriage contract for the ancestor who brought the Cabana name from France to Canada; a newspaper photo of my grandmother at forty, being serenaded at her desk by strangers; the 1907 passenger list recording my wife Lauren's great-grandmother, a 21-year-old housemaid from Galicia, arriving in New York; and the 1917 front-page obituary of her great-great-grandfather, a Pennsylvania coal miner who had left Austria-Hungary at 26.

The full tree and the documents are shared privately with family — if that's you, ask me for the link.