Current Research

Six articles are in various stages of preparation. Each draws on primary sources from The National Archives (UK), the East Sussex and Brighton Record Office, the Kent Archaeological Society, Canterbury Cathedral Archives, and other regional repositories.

A Generational Correction in a Kent Gentry Pedigree A published family pedigree contains a generational error that conflates father and son. The error was identified independently by a nineteenth-century herald but never propagated into mainstream scholarship. A correction article has been prepared for Archaeologia Cantiana.

Marriage, Trust, and Capital: Fiduciary Networks as Predictors of Marriage Alliance in Tudor Cranbrook Did trust come before marriage — or did marriage create trust? Across eleven interconnected clothier and gentry families in the Kentish Weald (c. 1460–1620), fiduciary appointments in wills and property records consistently precede marriage alliances, with zero counter-examples in the testable dataset. Targeting Continuity and Change.

Nine Armigerous Lines Through Two Tudor Gentry Networks (Parts I and II) The English ancestry of Abigail (Ruck) Thomas of Boston, traced through nine lines bearing arms, converging in two interconnected gentry networks centered on Cranbrook and Goudhurst, Kent. Part I covers the English pedigrees; Part II extends through the colonial American connections. Targeting the New England Historical and Genealogical Register and Archaeologia Cantiana.

Male-Line Extinction and Cognatic Descent in English Heraldry A study of how male-line extinction in armigerous families creates methodological challenges for cognatic-descent hereditary societies — and what a rigorous approach to those challenges looks like. Targeting The Coat of Arms.

A Multi-Platform AI Verification Methodology for Standards-Governed Research A formal description of the governance methodology developed across this research program: how to assign AI platforms to specialized roles, map them to an evidentiary standard, and produce an audit trail that demonstrates process integrity. Targeting the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, with a preprint on arXiv.