When Lawrence Fong visited museum ship HMS Belfast with his wife and children in 2024, he had no idea that he was about to make an extraordinary discovery. In the ship's East Asia Mess Decks he noticed a photo, and on reading the caption recognised the name of the person photographed - Lau So. That was the name of his maternal grandfather, but he knew little about him. He did know that his grandfather was a sailor during the Korean War and had died when Lawrence's mother was very young.
Do you know how your parents met? Where your grandparents went to school? Your mother's first job? My friend (and travel agent!) Carol Shaddux came up with a fun way to use the Do You Know Scale, a 20-item questionnaire I developed with my colleague Marshall Duke to assess knowledge of family stories. Carol suggests writing out each of the 20 questions on a strip of paper and having each family member pick one and then either tell or ask to hear that story.
She also doesn't understand why, as a woman in my 40s, I like certain things that she considers childish, like animated films. However, when I think about her childhood, I realize that she probably still has unhealed trauma that was never dealt with. She was born in France, just two months before the Nazis marched in, and spent the first five years of her life in wartime and economic struggles.
I was twenty-two, a recent graduate of a university named after Christopher Columbus. The Huffington Post had hired me to be their "Native Issues Fellow," essentially a glorified intern working mostly from behind a desk in New York City. My first headline, written in that tabloid-y left-of-centre HuffPost style: "Canada Just Confronted Its 'Cultural Genocide' of Native People. Why Can't the U.S. Do the Same?"
Lea Ypi was scrolling through social media when she stumbled across a black-and-white image of two glamorous newlyweds honeymooning at a luxury hotel in the Italian Alps. In the picture - taken in 1941, as World War II raged - a man reclines beside a woman, draped in fur and smiling warmly. Ypi recognised her instantly: it was her grandmother, Leman Leskoviku.
The year is 1941, and the woman is Lea Ypi's grandmother. Ypi saw the picture after it had been posted online by a stranger, gone viral across Albania, and attracted a stream of abuse. Morally degenerate was one comment.
The excavation at Newton's mother's house revealed lost and discarded domestic items, including broken pottery and gaming tokens, providing a glimpse into his fragmented family life.
As my father watched the news, his breath caught. A video of the inside of a prison cell was on the television. Tears streamed down his face. On one of the walls he could make out a poem, one he had written with his own hands.
Gerard's letters reveal the struggles and resilience of a young couple separated by war, highlighting Alice's resourcefulness and unyielding spirit during difficult times.
My mother was a secretary at the same FBI office. In those days, they did shorthand transcription-she was in the room when the agency was interrogating Nazi spies and sympathizers.
