I can’t go on. I’ll go on. — Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air Emalyn first came to my attention in a sensational newspaper article from the Berlin News Records, April 26, 1913 (now Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada): He Died Again but Shock Killed his Grandmother Butte, California, April 26,
A Tap on the Shoulder Damnatio Memoriae According to some authorities of history and population studies, about 117 billion people have been born on this earth. How many are forgotten? I would guess almost every single one; yet in my imagination, a few still stand and some still walk. In
John Collier Sr. was certainly a fascinating man. A true Florida pioneer, he was the personification of a “cracker” — but in the positive historical sense (more on the “cracker” origin story follows). As we shall see, his personal relationships are legion and deeply tangled. Let’s call him “John” from
From time to time I research and write histories about the ancestors or family members of various people. I am not personally related to John Moore Perkins, but I did write his biography for an individual who is part of his extended family. Perkins’ background and story is fascinating: John
Thomas William’s Family History Thomas Renton has a story. And, like everyone else, his story has meaning. We speak today of being “upwardly mobile”, but Thomas was the personification of this concept more than a century ago. As we will read, Thomas came from very humble origins. He was
Born on June 2, 1850, in Blean, a village in Canterbury, Kent, England, Sophia Holness lived a long, eventful life. The civil parish of Blean was heavily wooded, filled with ancient trees. The name of the village derives from the old English word “blea”, meaning rough ground and given the