Our author and founder-member of the Association, George H.J. Weber, was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1944. He has always been a near-obsessive collector of facts and figures: his first remembered project involved collecting lists of rulers and heads of state along with their genealogy and he still remembers the triumph, at age 12, when he managed to get hold of a list of the dual-kings of pre-1907 Bhutan... and his frustration at the hopelessly chaotic numbering of the earliest Swedish kings.

Until the mid-1980s George made his way in the typesetting and printing industry as well as in book and font design in Switzerland, England, Hong Kong and Thailand. His favourite work was mathematical, chemical and other scientific texts as well as the production of dictionaries, especially those involving languages using different systems of writing. He interest in systems of writing and in their histories has always remained with him.

For most of his life and wherever he found himself, George has studied some subject or another to get outside the grind of earning one's daily bread. Among the subjects he studied were English, meteorology, archaeology, history and prehistory, anthropology, palaeoanthropology, geology, astronomy, botany (especially of ferns and mosses) at a variety of universities and institutes and including the university of his own reading chair. This habit of continuous acquisition of odd bits of "useless" knowledge and skills has given him, in his own words, a "very wide but shallow database between the ears." Spotting connections that specialists often miss is today George's specialty

In his function of President and Hon.Sec. of the Andaman Association, George sees himself not so much as a researcher but as a generalist who can bring together scientists working in a wide variety of different fields. In the Andaman Association and through this Web-site he has been able to do this to a degree that has come as a surprise to everyone, including George himself.

In the mid-1980s and encouraged by Judy and Geoffrey Kingscott of Nottingham, he has written many popular articles on a wide variety of languages and linguistic subjects for the British "Language Monthly" and its successor publications since the early 1980s. It was during a search for the least-known but still living language family (George, typically, insists that readers should note family, not individual language) that he stumbled accross the Andamanese languages. That was nearly 20 years ago. His interest was roused by the solid brick wall encountered when trying to collect information on the subject. George is sometimes prone to solve a problem by going through the wall with his head first . That is what he did here: he charged - and eventually the wall crumbled. Today he has amassed a library of several hundred tomes as well as an Andamanese bibliography of more than 2000 relevant titles that is still growing at the rate of several new titles per week. As soon as he had located his first literature, George discovered what an unusual and grossly under-reported situation exists in the Andaman islands and how little is known of the Asian Negritos. He decided to make a wider study of the subject in general and not to limit himself to linguistics. He has never looked back again. The article on the Andamanese languages eventually did appear in the September 1998 issue of Language Today. It now forms the foundation for the linguistic chapters published on this web-site.

In the early 1990s Maria Eloi da Cruz-Neta, a Brazilian child psychologist of partly Amerindian (Yanomami) extraction. They met when George was looking for someone with a knowledge of an Amerindian language for - yes! - yet another of those articles. Eloi worked for the governor of Minas Gerais at Belo Horizonte then and was recommended through an unlikely daisy-chain of contacts as the right person to approach. Contact was established but soon Eloi discovered to her own surprised pain that she had forgotten most of her childhood knowledge of Yanomami which she had last used at the age of four. She could not be of much help linguistically but by then the correspondence was so interesting on all sorts of other subjects that it continued regardless. George went to Brazil to meet his lively correspondent face to face for the first time and later Eloi came to Switzerland to visit George. They married in 1993 and now live happily in Switzerland. Eloi takes a lively interest in and supports George's Andamanese work (they have been to the Andamans together in 1995) but she also follows her own scientific interests, among which intercultural psychology is foremost.

Unfortunately, due to health reasons, George has not been able to continue his work, and his website www.andaman.org has been removed from the net in 2009.