I suppose I should begin by explaining what someone named Tom Giammo, who has only Slovak and Italian ancestors, is doing on this List. The short answer is that I was fortunate to marry someone whose grandmother was from D'Escousse and whose grandfather was from River Bourgeois. Once I had been seized with the "genealogy fever", I became as passionate in tracking down wife Caral's ancestors as I was in tracking my own. Early on in this effort, I stumbled on the Isle Madame List. I soon realized that this may have been a mistake, at least in the frying pan to fire sense, when I found out how delighted the List members were to feed my genealogy addiction.
On the other hand, it has been a most rewarding experience. Through her grandparents, Caral has roots in many of the families in the area - Samson, Bissett, Beranger, Maguet, Landry, Pertus in the nearer generations and many other of the Acadian lines if one goes back further. I soon found that there were many expert researchers, both on and off this List, who had covered the earlier members of these lines very well and so, for the most part, I've gotten away in many areas with just confirming their results and restricting my own original Richmond County "source document" research to filling in the details on her more recent generations.
My major areas of original "source document" work for Caral has been the research into the ancestors of her Bissett line, which I finally was able to trace back from D'Escousse to River Bourgeois (1820s) to the Halifax area (1790s) to Lunenburg (1753) to France (1609) to Switzerland (1640s). I became so engrossed in this family that I started working at uncovering what I could on all of the descendants of the original 1753 Bissett immigrants to Nova Scotia. In 2003, I finally published a book on the subject, which I foolishly had hoped would help to reduce the hold that this particular obsession had on me.
In spite of the fact that Caral was born in Brooklyn NY, just over a mile from where I was born, we didn't meet until 1968 in Washington DC. We were married in 1970. We live in Maryland, jusy outside of Washington.
Both Caral and I have undergraduate degrees in Mathematics, mine from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and hers from Carnegie Mellon University. I also have a graduate degree in Mathematics from UCLA and have several published papers in queuing theory, reliability estimation, numerical algorithms, etc. We both got into computers in our undergraduate days and started our careers in that field after graduation.
Caral ended her work career as a Special Assistant for Computer Security Policy to a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Department of Defense - after having spent over a dozen years heading the software testing facilities of the World Wide Military Command and Control System. I had retired earlier as an Assistant Commissioner of the US Patent and Trademark Office, after having previously served in Senior Executive positions as an Associate Director at the US General Accounting Office and in the Air Force Communications Command. My most satisfying stints, however, were on various special assignments - e.g. President's Commission on Government Reorganization, advisor to the Millennium Copyright Commission, and in heading up the weather Service's advanced radar development efforts at the request of the US Secretary of Commerce.
Retirement has been a great boon for me. Although work was always interesting and I enjoyed the prestige and privileges that went with my positions, I welcomed the opportunity to escape to my "natural" environment where I could just "play" all day. I now write software, fiddle with my computer, do some math research, visit the Family History Center, build a woodworking project - all without feeling guilty that I ought to be "working". What a wonderful feeling that is!