Hank Jones

Henry Z ("Hank") Jones Jr. has been actively climbing family trees since the age of eight, when he found an old trunk filled with fading tintypes, family letters and old newspaper clippings in the basement of his parents' home in San Leandro, California. He wrote his first genealogical work, "A Few More Left: The Story of Isaac Hillman", his great-grandfather, while still in high school. Hank continued to pursue his genealogical interests while attending Stanford University, from which he graduated in 1963; this early research was mainly on his colonial-American Crippen, Whiting and Dibble lines. When Hank discovered that he descended from Abraham1 Bergmann, a German from Iggelheim in the Pfalz region who immigrated in 1709 to County Limerick, Ireland, his interest in all matters Palatine was born. He exhaustively combed all archives in Germany, London and Ireland to gather all extant data on this Irish-German group who arrived with his ancestor in 1709/10 and then published his result