A short version
I work in cyber security. Outside of that, my time goes to genealogy and Jewish communal life — the slow, quiet craft of tracing connections.
the longer version→
The short version is tidier. The longer one goes:
Cyber security — mostly the email side — is the day job that pays for everything else. Outside of it, most of my attention goes to two things that turn out to be the same thing — family history and Jewish communal life. One looks back, one looks forward, and both are really about what gets carried across generations.
Genealogy began as curiosity about a surname and grew into a seven-generation project across eleven countries. Somewhere along the way it stopped being data and became inheritance. Community work — co-founding the Derbyshire Jewish Community — is the present-tense version of the same urge: find a gap, fill it, remember who's vegetarian, book the room, send the email, show up.
Beyond those: Doctor Who (especially the earliest years), AI experiments that feel more like play than work, a chronic weakness for technical detours, and an instinct for the well-timed wind-up that refuses to retire.
Security
Genealogy
Community
Say hello
Six threads
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01 Cyber Security / trade +
The day job. Defensive side — understanding attacks well enough to block them. Mostly invisible when it's going well, which is how it should be.
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02 Genealogy / obsession +
Started as curiosity about a surname. Now runs seven generations deep across eleven countries. Somewhere along the way it stopped being data and became inheritance.
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03 Community / choice +
Co-founder and coordinator of the Derbyshire Jewish Community. Mostly unromantic logistics — emails, posts, events, welcoming newcomers. That's most of what community work actually is.
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04 Doctor Who / devotion +
Followed the whole run, from An Unearthly Child through the Wilderness Years, with AI-regenerated stand-ins for the episodes the BBC wiped. Strong views on the Hartnell and Troughton eras, and on which Doctors don't get the credit they deserve.
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05 AI / enthusiasm +
The rare technology that feels more like play than work. Equal parts skepticism and engagement.
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06 Mischief / instinct +
Best kept off the public record. The element of surprise is the whole point.
Where the family comes from
Seven generations, mostly reconstructed — a Jewish family scattered across Europe and the Middle East, and slowly stitched back together. The branches lived under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburgs and Austria-Hungary, Prussia and the German Empire, the Russian Empire and its Pale of Settlement, the Ottoman Empire, and finally the British Empire — most of them not by choice.
before all of this
Israel Judaea, originally +
Where Jewish history begins, and where every branch on this map traces its deepest origin.
Austria +
Vienna
City
17th to late 19th century, Habsburg Empire and Austria-Hungary. Vienna's Jews moved from restricted court-Jew status to full emancipation in 1867, after which the city became one of Europe's great Jewish centres. A great-great-grandfather of the family was born here in the year of emancipation itself.
Belarus +
Vitebsk
City
Late 19th century, Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement. Nearly half the town was Jewish — a shtetl of Yiddish-speaking tradesmen and scholars, and the birthplace of Marc Chagall, a cousin of the family through a shared surname line. The family left in the wave of emigration that followed the 1881 pogroms and the 1882 May Laws, which restricted Jewish settlement and livelihoods further still and drove hundreds of thousands from the Pale to Britain and America.
Czechia +
Dolní Kralovice
Village
Early 19th century, Habsburg Empire. A small rural Jewish community in Bohemia; daily life was constrained by Austria's Familiants Law — which capped the number of Jewish families and restricted marriages — until Jewish emancipation in 1849. Two generations of the family were born in this village; when emancipation finally opened the cities to Jews, the line moved on to Vienna, part of a broad 19th-century migration of Bohemian rural Jewry into the imperial capital.
Hlučín
Town
Late 18th century, on one of the most contested borders in central Europe. When a 5×great-grandfather was born here in 1772, the town had been Prussian Silesia for thirty years, having been lost by the Habsburgs in the Silesian Wars. Across the next five generations it would pass between Prussian, Czechoslovak, Nazi German, and Czechoslovak rule. The next generation of the family moved south to Rybnik, where this branch put down roots.
Germany +
Bavaria
Region
Late 17th to early 18th century, Holy Roman Empire. Jewish life in Bavaria during this period was largely rural and tightly constrained by court-protection arrangements, with communities centred on small towns rather than the larger cities. A 7×great-grandfather — a rabbi — was born here in 1700; the line then moved east into Habsburg Silesia, part of a broader 18th-century migration of Bavarian Jews toward the more established and legally secure Silesian communities, settling at Zülz where the family put down roots for the next several generations.
Breslau
City
Early 20th century, German Empire, Weimar Republic, then Nazi Germany. Breslau had one of Germany's largest Jewish communities and a famed rabbinical seminary — a world destroyed in the Shoah. A grandmother of the family was born here in 1938; her father was arrested on Kristallnacht and held at Buchenwald, until her mother walked into Gestapo headquarters and bluffed him out. The family fled in February 1939.
Opole
City
Mid-to-late 19th century, Kingdom of Prussia and then the German Empire. Jews had been emancipated in Prussia in 1812; the Upper Silesian community was middle-class, German-speaking, and well integrated. A great-great-grandmother of the family was born here in 1880; she was later shot at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas on 29 November 1941.
Pitschen
Village
Early 19th century, Kingdom of Prussia. A small Jewish community in an Upper Silesian market town, just before Prussia's 1812 Emancipation Edict lifted the last restrictions. A 4×great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1811.
Poznań
City
Late 19th century, Prussia and the German Empire. Poznań had been one of the most important Polish-Jewish centres for centuries; by this period the community was thinning as Jews moved westward to larger German cities. A great-great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1872 before making exactly that move — west to Breslau.
Rybnik
City
Early 19th century, Kingdom of Prussia. A modest Upper Silesian Jewish community, primarily engaged in trade and small commerce. Two generations of the family were born here in the early 1800s, working among the traders of Silesia.
Zülz
Village
18th to early 19th century, Habsburg then Prussian Silesia (Prussia took the region in 1742). Zülz was remarkable — one of only two towns in all of Silesia where Jews were permitted continuous residence from medieval times. Two generations of the family were born here: a 6×great-grandfather in 1741, and a 4×great-grandmother in 1814. After the 1812 Prussian Emancipation Edict allowed Jews to live anywhere in Prussian territory, the concentrated Jewish community in Zülz slowly dispersed, and this branch moved on to Pitschen.
Iraq +
Baghdad
City
Mid-19th to mid-20th century, Ottoman Empire and then Kingdom of Iraq. One of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world, tracing back to the Babylonian exile — around 40,000 strong by 1900, prosperous in trade, banking and crafts. Shattered by the Farhud in June 1941, a two-day anti-Jewish pogrom in the power vacuum following the collapse of the pro-Nazi Iraqi government — among the dead was a great-great-grandfather of the family.
Basrah
City
Turn of the 20th century, Ottoman Empire. A Jewish merchant community at the Gulf trade port, closely tied to Baghdad's much larger community further up the Tigris. A great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1900; the family later made its way to England, part of the broader Baghdadi-Jewish merchant diaspora that moved through the British Empire's trade networks — Bombay, Shanghai, Singapore, and London — and the family name was anglicised on arrival.
Ireland +
Dublin
City
Late 19th and early 20th century, United Kingdom-ruled Ireland. The Dublin branch of the family arrived by accident — Russian Jewish refugees bound for America, they landed in Liverpool, made their way across to Dublin, and settled in Portobello, the city's 'Little Jerusalem' that filled with Lithuanian and Russian arrivals in the 1880s-90s. The Irish-born daughter they raised there grew up with a thick Irish accent and eventually took it with her to London.
Latvia +
Daugavpils
City
Early 18th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (soon after, Russian Empire). Known in Yiddish and in Jewish records as Dvinsk, the city would later become one of the great Lithuanian-Latvian yeshiva centres. A 9×great-grandmother of the family was born here in 1706.
Riga
City
17th to early 20th century, successive rule under Swedish, Polish-Lithuanian, and Russian empires. One branch of the family — traceable back through seven generations — was anchored in Riga continuously from the 1620s, when a 9×great-grandfather was born there, through to a great-grandmother born in 1901. Riga by 1900 had become a major Baltic Jewish centre, with roughly one in ten residents Jewish and flourishing Yiddish and Hebrew cultural life; the 1901-born great-grandmother left for England as part of the broader emigration out of the Russian Empire in the years around the 1903–1906 pogroms.
Lithuania +
Kaunas
City
Late 19th century and then the Second World War, Russian Empire and then Nazi-occupied Lithuania. Kovno was a major Litvak centre — home to the famed Slabodka Yeshiva and a third Jewish by population. A great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1898. Four decades later, two great-great-grandmothers from other branches of the family were shot at the Ninth Fort on 29 November 1941, having been deported from Germany for that purpose. In the same year, that great-grandfather's own mother was killed a hundred kilometres west, in the Ponary massacres near Vilna — a third casualty from a third branch, all in 1941.
Kukliai
Village
Mid-17th century, Grand Duchy of Lithuania within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A tiny village in the southern Suvalkija region, near Lazdijai. A 10×great-grandmother of the family was born here around 1654, before the line moved to Riga.
Lazdijai
Town
Late 16th to early 17th century, Grand Duchy of Lithuania. A small town in Suvalkija near the Polish border, part of the deep Lithuanian-Jewish heartland. An 11×great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1572 — among the deepest anchored ancestors on the tree — and the line continued here for another generation before moving north to Riga.
Poland +
Będzin
Town
Early 18th to 19th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then Congress Poland under the Russian Empire. A predominantly Jewish town near the Silesian border, where Jews had lived continuously since the medieval period and made up around four-fifths of the population by the 19th century. Multiple generations of the family were born here from the 1740s through the 1830s — among the deepest continuous Polish anchors in the tree.
Chęciny
Town
Late 18th to mid-19th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then Russian-ruled Congress Poland. A medieval market town in the Świętokrzyskie hills near Kielce, with one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in Poland — its synagogue dates from the 1630s. Three generations of the family were born here, from a 5×great-grandfather around 1786 to a 3×great-grandmother in 1838.
Ciechanów
Town
Mid-19th century, Congress Poland under the Russian Empire. A market town north of Warsaw whose Jewish population grew to roughly half the total before the First World War. A 3×great-grandfather was born here around 1846; his son moved west to Lubień Kujawski, and his grandson — the next generation on — would emigrate further still, to London's East End, joining the broader Russian-Jewish flight that intensified after the 1881 pogroms. That grandson would open the Cable Picture Palace on Cable Street.
Głogów
City
Late 17th to early 18th century, Habsburg Silesia (Prussian after 1742). A Lower Silesian city — German Glogau — where the family's deepest known Polish ancestor, an 8×great-grandfather, was born in 1670. The line continued here for several generations before moving south to Zülz, where this branch's continuous story properly begins.
Grabów nad Prosną
Town
Mid-19th century, Prussian-ruled Province of Posen. A small market town in the Greater Poland region, and the namesake of one of the family's lines. A 3×great-grandfather was born here in 1840; his son was born a generation later in Posen city itself.
Kobylin
Town
Mid-19th century, Prussian-ruled Province of Posen. A small market town with a Jewish community of a few hundred. A 3×great-grandfather was born here in 1848; his daughter, a generation later, would be born in Rawicz and end her life at the Ninth Fort in 1941.
Krotoszyn
Town
Mid-18th to mid-19th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then (after partition) Prussian-ruled Province of Posen. A Greater Poland town with a Jewish community established in the 17th century. Several generations of the family were born here from the 1740s onward.
Lubień Kujawski
Town
Late 19th century, Congress Poland under the Russian Empire. A small shtetl in Kuyavia, like thousands of others where Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities formed the commercial backbone of market towns. A great-great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1877 before emigrating to London's East End in the same wave of post-1881 Jewish flight that brought so many families out of Russian-ruled Poland.
Radom
City
Early 20th century, Russian Empire until 1918 and then the Second Polish Republic. Unlike the rest of the family, this branch was Polish Catholic — part of the non-Jewish majority in a growing industrial town. A great-grandfather from this line escaped occupied Poland in 1939, making his way through Romania, Hungary and France to England, where he served as a wireless mechanic with Polish RAF squadrons — including at RAF Tempsford, the secret airfield from which SOE agents were flown into occupied Europe.
Raszków
Town
Mid-19th century, Prussian-ruled Province of Posen. A small market town in the Greater Poland region, in the Ostrów Wielkopolski (Adelnau) district. A 3×great-grandmother was born here in 1855.
Staszów
Town
Early-to-mid 19th century, Congress Poland under the Russian Empire. A market town in the Świętokrzyskie hills with one of Poland's oldest Jewish communities — four-fifths Jewish by the end of the 19th century. A 5×great-grandfather was born here in 1838, and the line reaches back one further generation to a 6×great-grandfather born around 1817. His son emigrated north to Warsaw, and the family eventually made its way to London's East End, part of the same post-1881 exodus that drew so many Russian-ruled Polish Jews westward.
Rawicz
Town
Mid-to-late 19th century, Prussian-ruled Province of Posen. Jews here were increasingly Germanised in language and custom; many eventually moved west to Breslau and Berlin. A great-great-grandmother of the family was born in Rawicz in 1878; she stayed behind when the next generation fled in 1939, was later deported, and was shot at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas on 29 November 1941.
Warsaw
City
Mid-to-late 19th century, Congress Poland under the Russian Empire. Warsaw held the largest Jewish community in Europe — hundreds of thousands of Yiddish and Polish speakers, a hub of Jewish publishing, theatre and politics. Several great-great-grandparents of the family were born here in the 1860s-70s; they emigrated to London's East End in the wave of Jewish flight that followed the 1881 pogroms and the 1882 May Laws — Tsarist legislation that restricted where Jews could live and work, driving roughly two million from the Pale of Settlement to Britain and America.
Slovakia +
Nitra
City
Early to mid-19th century, Kingdom of Hungary under the Habsburgs. Nitra had a historic Jewish community with its own Orthodox yeshiva — a small but significant town in the Hungarian Jewish landscape. Two generations of the family were born here in the early 1800s before the line eventually made its way to Vienna.
and now
London, England where I was born +
19th and 20th centuries. The East End — Whitechapel, Stepney, Hackney — became home to tens of thousands of Ashkenazi refugees fleeing Tsarist pogroms, with several branches of the family among them; Baghdadi Sephardi families like the Sassoons settled separately. A great-great-grandfather opened the Cable Picture Palace on Cable Street in 1912; after his early death his widow kept it going until the Blitz destroyed it on 5 May 1941. Generations later, it's also where I was born.
Derbyshire, England where I live +
Home with my wife since 2023, and where I co-founded the Derbyshire Jewish Community.
The family, mapped
Thirty-four places across eleven countries — and one ancient origin in Israel, plus a home in Derbyshire. Drag to pan, scroll or pinch to zoom, click any marker to jump to its detail above.