I was born on July 16, 1953 in Rockford, Illinois, where I have lived all but a few years of my life in the home of my parents. I briefly attended the University of Chicago and spent four years in the U.S. Navy as a quartermaster second-class on a frigate homeported in Athens, Greece. During my stint with the Navy I traveled throughout much of Europe and the Caribbean. I took up art when I was past thirty and am entirely self-taught. After a show in a Rockford cafe in 1988, I was picked up by the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago. I have been exhibiting nationally and working full-time as a painter ever since. A bachelor, I live with my mother, brother, and sister.

Interests Vintage cinema, sci-fi/horror films of the '50's and '60's, classic, silent, foreign, and a few select recent films. I have a collection of about 2300 films on DVD's, not including complete recording of such old TV shows such as The Avengers, Outer Limits, The Saint, The Invaders, Secret Agent, Thriller, Honey West, and others. Some of my personal favorites are Carnival of Souls, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Bucket of Blood, Angel and the Badman, Amelie, Adventures of Robin Hood, Emma, Mesa of Lost Women, and Vertigo.

Music --- I have about 60 gigabytes of music in the external memory for my Apple©iBook and frequently listen to music as I paint. My tastes tend mostly to traditional popular, Celtic, light classical, crossover, and some New Age music, and performers I listen to most are Enya, The Carpenters, Jane Morgan, Liane, Dana Winner, Secret Garden, Astrud Gilberto, Isobel Campbell, Capercaillie, Hayley Westenra, Katie Melua, and Lily Allen.

UFO's, psychic phenomenon, cryptozoology, the occult, etc.; history, especially medieval and ancient; literature, mostly 19th Century novels (Jane Austen, Dickens, the Brontes, and so forth) --- I have about 400 books stored in my computer! ----; figure skating; Chicago Cubs baseball.

Family and Ancestry My father, Norman Anderson was a bricklayer whose father, John MacKenzie Anderson was a mason contractor who emigrated to Rockford, Illinois, from Scotland (The Black Isle in the Northeast, where my ancestors were farmers). My mother, Margaret Blaisdell Anderson, is the daughter of artist, cartoonist, and illustrator E. Warde Blaisdell and the granddaughter of Eijah Whittier Blaisdell, Jr., who after coming to Rockford in 1853 from Vergennes, Vermont, was a newspaper publisher, organizer of the Republican Party in northern Illinois, lawyer, state legislator, (a colleague was Abraham Lincoln, whom he was the first to support for President in 1856), and novelist. They were descended from Ralph Blaisdell, a Lancashire tailor who came to America in 1635. Through the my maternal grandparents I can name as antecedents several score early settlers of New England, including Nathaniel Merrill, Lt. Thomas Wheeler, Edward Spaulding, John Steele, Nathaniel Foote, Anthony Colby, Wiliam Sargent, Reinold Marvin, John Lawrence, John Whitney, William Tuttle, Maj-Gen. Robert Sedgwick, Edward Gilman, Nicholas Holt, James Davis, John Folsom, John Perkins, Matthew Beckwith, and my favorite, the infamous Salem witch Susannah North Martin, God bless her! I have a half a dozen or so ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War including a great, great, great, great grandfather, Colonel Charles Burrall, in addition to several illustrious Puritan leaders of New England, Governors William Leete and Thomas Welles of Connecticut, Governor William Brenton of Rhode Island, Indian missionary Reverend John Eliot, Reverend John Lathrop, and most notably, Governor Thomas Dudley of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who was descended from the Barons Dudley. My great, great, great, great grandfather was a fifth cousin of George Washington and I am a fourth cousin, some generations removed, of the late Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, Honest Abe's great grandson and last surviving descendent, as well as a seventh cousin, thrice removed of Lincoln himself. I am in fact related to many US Presidents, Filmore, Pierce, Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Arthur, Cleveland, Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Nixon, Ford, and the Bushes, and to others more distantly from English ancestors, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Wilson, Clinton, and Reagan. I am also related to VP's William Wheeler, Charles Dawes, Charles Curtis (only a fourth cousin!), Henry Wallace, and Dick Cheney, First Ladies Lemonade Lucy Rutherford, both of TR's wives, Flossie Harding, and Barbara Bush, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Longfellow, Nathaniel Currier, Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Robert Sherwood, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, and George Plimpton, as well as Anne Bradstreet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Emily Dickinson, to John Hancock, William Tecumsah Sherman Wild Bill Hickok, duellist Aaron Burr, traitor Benedict Arnold, and Presidential assassin Charles Guiteau (oops!), J.P. Morgan, the Posts, Kelloggs, Doubledays, and Scribners, Charles Albert Pillsbury, Charles Edward Merrill, Eli Whitney, as well as to John Brown, Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, Sir Winston Churchill, the Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Dulles, Alice Longworth and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., Thomas Dewey, the Adlai Stevensons, Henry Cabot and John Lodge, George Kennan, Pamela Harriman, William Rehnquist, Mitt Romney, Bill Richardson, John Kerry, David Souter, and Howard Dean, as well as artists John Singleton Copley, Norman Rockwell, and Georgia O'Keefe, the Wright brothers, Amelia Earhart, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and astronauts Scott Carpenter, Alan Shepherd, and Christa McAuliffe, Walter Cronkite, Johnny Carson, Frank Gifford, and Dick Clark, Playboy Hugh Hefner and Mayflower Madam Sydney Biddle Barrows, actors Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn (both mere 7th cousins), Fay Wray, Spencer Tracy, Robert Montgomery, Shirley Temple, Bette Davis, John Wayne, William Holden, Vincent Price, John Carradine, Gary Merrill, Anthony Perkins, Spring Byington, Jane Wyatt, Jane Wyman, the Gish sisters, Dina Merrill. Raquel Welsh, Clint Eastwood (many, many times), Lloyd Bridges, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, James Coburn, Lee Marvin, George Hamilton, Sam Waterston, the Baldwin brothers, the Arquettes, Richard Gere, Bob Newhart, Sigourney Weaver, Beatrice Straight, Glenn Close, Brooke Shields, Paul Giamatti, Kelsey Grammar, Christopher Reeve, John Lithgow, Edie Sedgwick, Kyra Sedgwick (the inevitable Kevin Bacon link), Halle Berry (really!), dancer Irene Castle, singers Lillian Russell, Brian Wilson, Kris Kristoferson, Chynna Phillips, and my favorite, Jane Morgan, and to royal Serena Armstrong-Jones, Viscountess Linley, (Princess Margaret's daughter-in-law). More distant are cousinly connections to Sir William Hamilton (Emma's husband), Mary Cathcart Graham (of the Gainesborough portrait), Charles Darwin, Jane Austen (through the d'Arcy family), Lord Byron, Lord Tennyson, and the Duke of Wellington, P. T. Barnum, Jesse James, lizzie Borden, Bing Crosby, Orson Welles, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine, Patrick Macnee, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Elvis Presley, Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, Jack Nicholson, and Camilla Parker-Bowles. I am related to both Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana many times (I am twice a ninth cousin of Prince William, also twice a 12th cousin and a 13th cousin 22 times). Also distantly related am I to descendants of the Earl of Dudley, members of the Ward family, which, besides politicians and military leaders, include some really interesting actresses, Penelope Dudley-Ward and her daughter Tracy Reed (step-daughter of Sir Carol Reed), Rachel Ward, her sister Tracy Ward, who is now the Marchioness of Worcester, and the Honourable Georgina Ward, daughter of a British cabinet minister, the late Viscount Ward of Witley, and once married to Senator John Kerry's uncle, Alastair Forbes.

Through the marriage of my forbear Reverend John Woodbridge to Mercy Dudley, the daughter of Gov. Thomas Dudley, I can claim as ancesters the Barons Dudley. From the 3rd Baron Dudley, Thomas' great-grandfather, and his wife Lady Cecily Grey, a half-first cousin of Henry VIII and a great-aunt of Lady Jane Grey, I am descended from a legion of medieval notables, several famous beauties, Elizabeth Woodville, the wife of Edward IV and grandmother of Henry VIII, her mother Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, the wife of the Black Prince and mother of Richard II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Mathilda de Caux, Lady of Laxton, in Nottinghamshire, a possible model for the fictional Maid Marian, --- sixteen of the twenty-five Magna Carta sureties, as well as famous members of the de Mortimer, de Clare, and de Montfort families, a number of de Greys, de Nevilles, de Veres, d'Arcys, de Fiennes, de Staffords, de Audleys, de Beaumonts, de Montgomerys, de Montagus, and de Greystokes (Tarzan's forbears?) --- and a bewildering number of French counts and dukes --- connected over three hundred times (87 times through legitimate offspring) to the Kings of England from Edward III on back, as well as all the early French kings (Philip Augustus, Saint Louis, Hugh Capet, and, of course, Charlemagne, the father seemingly of us all, as well as Clovis and the Merovingians); a plethora of kings and dukes from Aragon, Navarre, Castile, and Leon, including El Cid; a gaggle of Holy Roman Emperors such as Frederick Barbarossa; the early kings of Scotland (minus MacBeth); Alfred the Great and the Saxon kings going back to Hengest; Lady Godiva (I mean "Godgifu of Mercia"); the Welsh prince Llewelyn the Great and his ancestors, the Kings of Gwynedd; some Manx and Irish kings, including Brian Boru, the Norse kings of Dublin and earls of Orkney; a couple Polish kings, the grand dukes of Kiev and Rurik, the 1st Czar of Russia; almost all the crusader Kings of Jerusalem; several Byzantine emperors, a stray king of Italy and of Germany; an Hungarian king named Bela (what else?)and his line; practically all the early kings of Scandinavia (Saint Olaf, Gorm the Old, and Erik Blood-ax) going back to the first century BC and Fernjot, the Ancient Giant, King of Kventland; the Tsars of Bulgaria; the Kings and governors of Armenia back to ancient times and through them, the early Hellenistic kings of Syria and Egypt (Seleucus, Ptolemy, and several Cleopatras, although not the Cleo), the shahs of ancient Persia (Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes), the Chaldeans (Nebuchadnezzar), and a line of Assyrian kings stretching back to the beginning of the second millenium BC; some barbarian chieftains like Theodoric the Great and Attila the Hun, who may have been descended from the Han dynasty of China; many Ummayed emirs of Cordoba and caliphs of Bagdad, and other notables as well, including a dozen or so saints. I am posting my genealogical findings on http://home.comcast.net/~stephander/site/