I've been taking pictures since my tenth birthday, when my Aunt Kathryn gave me a plastic dime-store camera that used 120-format film. The first camera I bought for myself was a used Argus C-3 that I found in the local camera shop four years later. It was the only 35mm camera there that I could afford. I started converting to digital around 1999 when I bought a used Olympus C-2020z from a co-worker. For a while I shot in both digital and film but for the last ten years I've stuck pretty much to digital Nikon cameras, first using a D-50 , then a D-200 , and now a D-90 . I took the picture shown here with the D-90 from the boat that goes to Catalina Island from Newport Beach, California.

I'm a Lutheran by birth, but I left the Lutheran Church in my early twenties because I had become convinced there were better ways to live the Christian life. Much later I returned to it, this time a Lutheran by conviction, having learned that there is after all no better way. That experience has led me to create this site in appreciation of the teaching of Martin Luther and the Lutheran Confessions.

The graphic at right depicts the tower of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, where Martin Luther nailed his "Ninety Five Theses" to the door on October 31, 1517, an event which is today viewed as the start of the Reformation.

This is the oldest site of mine that's still on the Web. It's more than a little dated, but I keep it around for sentimental reasons. Eventually the material here will be incorporated into an updated version of a Born family Website described below, "The Descendants of Herman and Amanda Born." I created this first version in 2001 after a visit to North Dakota to visit the farm on which my father had been raised, which was about five miles from the farm on which his father had been raised, pictured here, which my great-grandfather built about twenty years after he had immigrated here from Germany as a young man in the early 1880's. We'd visited my father's home in North Dakota every year when I was growing up and that annual summer vacation was always the highlight of the year, but 2001 was the first time I'd returned in twenty-three years; I was also able to make visits each of the two following years, in 2002 and 2003.

After another absence of 19 years, in June 2022 I returned again to northeastern North Dakota and my grandparents' farm, this time for a family reunion of the descendants of my grandparents or, in other words, of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of my father and his siblings, who are pictured in this photo from the early 1930's. This site contains photos of the reunion and also serves as an update of my "North Dakota Roots" site above. When it's complete I will archive that older site.

These are pictures from the old photo albums of my mother-in-law Dorothy that I converted to digital images after she died in 2017. They include many of my wife and her sister from the time they were babies until their high school graduation, as well as many of their father John, a captain in the army during World War II serving in counter-intelligence, whom I never met because he died when his girls were just one year old.