About

Hello, I’m Tim Ransom, author of this site.

Full disclosure: I am not a professional historian. My academic training was in physiological and comparative psychology, first at Williams College and then at the U. of California, Berkeley, for my Ph.D. Specializing in the behavior of nonhuman primates (baboons), I learned a good deal about what it means to be a primate, particularly our need for well-defined spaces–personal and social–especially for the groups that we identify with. Eventually this understanding would lead me to look closely at the stories of the folks who speak of long lives of seeking, defining, and defending those spaces–first the elders in a small island community on an island off Washington State, and then the folks who, as owners of a small dairy farm on the edge of an estuary in Southern Puget Sound, were caught in the battles over the definition of land and its uses there. Add in an abiding belief in stories and their role in sharing our values, and a certain skill in eliciting oral histories from even the most recalcitrant among us, and you have the books I have written and the pages of this blog. I hope you will share them with me.

My wife and I live in Olympia, Washington, a wonderful little town at the south end of Puget Sound. We share a love of trees (especially sequoias) and, of course our children and grandchildren, who are elsewhere.