Epoch Foundry is an independent research-and-publishing house. It works from primary sources — parish registers, emigration lists, letters, photographs — and turns them into books made to last, beginning with the Renken line of Ostfriesland.
Church books, civil registers, ship manifests and land records read in the original — German, Low German, Latin — with every finding cited to the page and the archive that holds it.
Narrative and reference works set with care, printed to library standard, and issued under our own ISBNs so the house — not a platform — is the publisher on the record.
Photographs, translations and transcriptions preserved in described, backed-up collections, so that what one generation recovers the next one can find.
Genealogy is easy to assert and hard to prove. Every claim in an Epoch Foundry book can be traced back through the same four steps, and the working papers are kept so that a reader — or a descendant — can check them.
Epoch Foundry, LLC was formed in September 2026 in Loudoun County, Virginia, by Jon Renken to research, archive and publish his family's history, with the same insistence on traceability he brought to a working life in engineering. The name joins two ideas: an epoch, the fixed point from which time is reckoned; and a foundry, where type was cast and metal poured — research made into something solid.
This site is set in Newsreader and IBM Plex. The mark is a single sort of cast type, its letter reversed as it would be before printing.
Enquiries from relatives, researchers and librarians are welcome. Correspondence about Renken family records is answered personally.