Still here. Still curious. Still insufficiently supervised.

Hi, I’m Clayton Hollingsworth.

I’m a father, writer, researcher, nonprofit leader, occasional teacher, and serial starter of projects that were originally supposed to take one weekend.

Most of my professional life has been spent around philanthropy, education, communications, and organizational leadership. Somewhere along the way, I became much more interested in the stories underneath institutions than the polished versions printed in annual reports.

That curiosity follows me home.

A question about an ancestor becomes a census record, then a land deed, then an 1830 probate file, then a map, then suddenly it is 2:14 in the morning and I am trying to determine whether two men with nearly identical names crossed the Brazos River in the same decade. This happens more often than it should.

UNSUPERVISED* is where I put the results.

It is a place for history, family, fatherhood, research, public life, personal reflection, odd discoveries, unfinished questions, and projects that have become significantly more elaborate than anyone requested.

I’m currently working on The Arms of God: Los Brazos de Dios, a family history following one family through roughly two hundred years along the Brazos River. I’m interested in ancestors as human beings rather than little names attached to leaves on genealogy websites. Some were admirable. Some were complicated. Some left records that raise more questions than they answer. The point is not to make them look better. The point is to understand them.

Appropriately—or suspiciously—I now live at Lake Whitney in Bosque County, Texas, where the Brazos River was dammed to form the lake about seventy-five years ago. So I find myself writing about generations shaped by this river while living beside a modern version of the same landscape. Depending on the day, that feels either wonderfully poetic or like an extremely elaborate excuse for living by the water.

I’m also the father of a teenage daughter, which provides a useful daily reminder that confidence is best worn lightly, humor fixes quite a lot, and nobody has ever asked for the eleven-minute version when the three-minute version would do.

I like strong half-sweet, half-unsweetened iced tea with lemon (even for breakfast), old photographs, maps, good questions, unlikely connections, historical footnotes, and stories that become less tidy—and much more interesting—the closer you look.