After he married, Dan collected birth, marriage, and death certificates from state and Canadian offices.
He laboriously transcribed his family's ancestral records in ink onto the pages of a leather-bound book, the
then-popular Bailey's Photo-Ancestral Record. Meanwhile, he earned a B.S. degree from the
California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo and a MBA degree
from the California State University at Fullerton.
Dan began his professional career as a reliability engineer at the Autonetics Division of North American Aviation (NAA) . Promoted to senior engineering and managerial positions, he remained with NAA (later named Rockwell International and now part of The Boeing Company) for 16 years. During those years he worked on the U.S. Navy's SINS, Polaris, and Poseidon programs; the USAF's Minuteman I, Minuteman II, and B-1B Lancer programs; and Rockwell International's Admiral Color Television program (where he was the Color TV Program Manager). He routinely worked with large IBM mainframe computers.
In 1978 Dan launched Adventures In Computing, Inc. and developed accounting applications — which he marketed and sold to small businesses and to a Silicon Valley computer manufacturer.
In 1981 he joined the Citicorp Development Center (CDC) in Los Angeles, a software-development unit of Citibank and Citigroup. During his 23 years there he worked with ATMs, minicomputers, and secured computer networks. He was appointed to several chief-of-staff, product-, and line-management positions. Most recently, he was CDC's Business Information Security Officer (BISO) and manager of Security & Configuration Management. Dan was a retiree of both The Boeing Company and Citigroup.
Meanwhile, Dan designed, programmed, and marketed the A&D genealogical software system, founded Adventures In Ancestry, Inc. with his wife Karen, and in 1995 obtained U.S. Patent view it on genealogical date processing. During his 50+ years of computer experience, he taught numerous courses on information system design, report writers, IBM utilities and JCL, word processing, Microsoft programming, HTML, and on accounting and genealogy applications.
Dan's family history covers over 2,600 individuals, is supported by over 1,600 source documents, and includes his ancestral surnames Hancock, Bird, Catt, Coleman, Ellison, Fisher, Jackson, McFarren, Samuels, and Williams. (Click here to learn more about the Hancock family.) A long-time alpine skier, Dan's other interests included reading novels, 27 ocean and river cruises, ballroom dancing, and refining this website. He visited over 60 countries.
After long struggles with Chronic myeloloid leukemia (CML) and Parkinson's disease, Dan passed away on 19 May 2021, and is buried in the New Auburn Cemetery, Auburn, California.
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