The author is the fifth of nine children from a French-Canadian and German-Russian family background. The author was born in a small town in North Dakota. The author was raised and schooled in a se...lihat lebih banyakThe author is the fifth of nine children from a French-Canadian and German-Russian family background. The author was born in a small town in North Dakota. The author was raised and schooled in a series of public schools in small- and medium-sized North Dakota and Eastern Montana. As a youth and young man, he worked at many part-time jobs before finally gaining employment as a locomotive fireman on the Great Northern Railway—a job that enabled him to have enough income to attain higher education. He attended Concordia College, Northern Montana College, and finally graduated from the University of Montana. He entered the two-year medical school of the University of North Dakota as a classmate of his younger brother in 1958 and finished the last two years of medical training at the University of Washington in 1962. After a one year internship in Spokane, Washington, he went on to do general practice of medicine in North Dakota, three years before entering and completing a three-year fellowship training at Gorgas Hospital in the Panama Canal Zone. By that time, he was married and the father of three sons and a daughter. He began practicing ophthalmology in Oregon, but later practiced in Washington state and then in New Mexico. He worked for a few years as an urgent care physician, and then seven years in a psychiatric hospital, from which he retired in 2000. He read, studied, and traveled about in Quebec and New England for five years doing family genealogy and working at various writing projects of his own conception. Subsequently, he worked part-time for ten years at optometry in New Mexico while writing and publishing five books and now this sixth book.lihat lebih sedikit