I’m the creator and Founder of Bookship, a social reading app, and The Hawaii Project, a personalized book recommendation engine. As you can guess, I’m pretty passionate about books. And startups. and music.
Previously I was ceo and co-founder of goby, a personalized recommendation engine for finding fun things to do. After goby was acquired by Telenav (NASDAQ: TNAV), I became Head of Product for Telenav
Before all that I did time at Endeca, PTC, Netezza, Evans & Sutherland in a variety of R&D, professional services and business development roles. When I’m not obsessing over work, I’m a proud husband and father of two great kids, love to play tennis, am a compulsive reader and book collector, and am really into way too many different kinds of music.
(What’s with the Viking you might ask? While the vikings were known to split a skull or two, I mean more the verb than the noun, as in “to go adventuring” in the sense of the Old Norse fara í víking. I’ve always been interested in the vikings and started using viking2917 as a handle to avoid spammers way back when, and have just kept using it….)
Hey Mark! I found your post on Watkins Ferry. https://www.viking2917.com/what-lasts/
I too am a descendent of Evan Watkins, so we must be cousins to some degree. Curious where our overlap might be. My tree goes > Samuel Ward Watkins Sr (1836-1916) > John Dill Watkins (1808-1860) > Evan Watkins (1765-1840) > Peter Watkins (1731-1801)> Evan Watkins Sr. (1710-1765). Also, in our line we have an oral tradition indicating that we go back to the Jamestown settlement, but we can’t find any evidence of this. Any knowledge in this area? Thanks! Jim Watkins
(10/26/21)
Hi Jim! Thanks for the note! I will dig into this later today and see what I can come up with!
Hi Jim,
So, I I think our branches diverge at Peter Watkins ( x – 1801). I’m having trouble nailing down the precise tree but I think Peter had a son David, and (I think) we are descended through him.
Don’t have any info about the Jamestown settlement, but as I like to say, “never let the facts stand in the way of a good story” 🙂
If I can learn more, will post!