Mine has been an extremely peripatetic life. After training as a librarian at UC Berkeley in California, I worked in that and related fields in Britain, Uganda, Ghana, Bermuda, Australia, Japan, The Netherlands, Turkey, Brazil, and France, where I eventually settled.

I discovered the glory of French archives and delved into researching French family histories. For sixteen years, I explained French genealogical research in The French Genealogy Blog, writing more than one thousand posts on the subject. Many of those posts have been published in booklets.

It was in the military archives of the Service Historique de la Défense in Vincennes that I first discovered the American prisoners of Napoleon. For the next fifteen years or so, I hunted them in archives all over France, piecing together their story. Napoleon’s American Prisoners is the result of that work. I tell the stories of many seamen in that book but there are just as many more that could not be included; I continue to research them and plan to write about them here.

There also were in France, during the Napoleonic era, a number of American investors, speculators and sea captains who had gone there initially to profit from the chaos of the French Revolution and stayed on. Their stories are fascinating. They are the subject of my next book, which will tell about the privateer they ran from France, against British shipping, with a crew of just-released prisoners, during the War of 1812.