Maternal Grandfather Quotes

The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to "protect the family name"(as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another) -the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third cousin gave a concert at carnegie hall (as if the achievement of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another) -the parents who search geneological trees in order to evaluate their prospective son-in-law. -the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history -All these are samples of racism.

Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I countered by inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father’s maternal grandfather had been, say, a Turk.

I also came from a notable family—my mother was a US senator, my father was the dean of the college of medicine at UCLA, and my maternal grandfather was an astronaut.

I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.

The eighth was Lofdi; he was a great warrior king with a following called the Lofdar; he founded the dynasty of Lofdungs. To that lineage belongs Eylimi, the maternal grandfather of Sigurd who slew the serpent Fafnir.

One day in the 1980s, my maternal grandfather was sitting in a park in suburban London. An elderly British man came up to him and wagged a finger in his face. “Why are you here?” the man demanded. “Why are you in my country?” “Because we are the creditors,” responded my grandfather, who was born in India, worked all his life in colonial Kenya, and was now retired in London. “You took all our wealth, our diamonds. Now we have come to collect.” We are here, my grandfather was saying, because you were there.

It was hardly a surprise to find St. Vincent here, since his family owned the club, and his maternal grandfather had been Ivo Jenner himself. In recent years, St. Vincent had taken over the management of the club from his father. By all accounts, he was doing an excellent job of it, with his customary cool and relaxed aplomb.

Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o.’ ‘I don’t know disassociation.’ ‘Well, love, but you know the idiom “not yourself” — “He’s not himself today,” for example,’ crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. ‘There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’ ‘Engulf means obliterate.’ ‘I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is “existential,” Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger than my father’s. My grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was a great deal of money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently narrowed the field to two choices — Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy coffee substitute that sold out of pharmacy soda fountains and was rumored to contain smidgeons of cocaine, which was the subject of much controversy in those days. My father’s father chose Delaware Punch, which apparently tasted like rancid cranberry juice, and the manufacturer of which folded. And then his next two potato harvests were decimated by blight, resulting in the forced sale of his farm. Coca-Cola is now Coca-Cola. My father said his father showed very little emotion or anger or sadness about this, though. That he somehow couldn’t. My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.’ She’s not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario’s been looking at her. She smiled. ‘My father, of course, could himself tell this story only when he was drunk. He never threw anyone through any windows. He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale and reading the newspaper, for hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one day he fell out of the chair and didn’t get up again, and that was how your maternal grandfather passed away. I’d never have gotten to go to University had he not died when I was a girl. He believed education was a waste for girls. It was a function of his era; it wasn’t his fault. His inheritance to Charles and me paid for university.’ She’s been smiling pleasantly this whole time, emptying the butt from the ashtray into the wastebasket, wiping the bowl’s inside with a Kleenex, straightening straight piles of folders on her desk.

Dusty, when Winter comes, the land goes to sleep for its much needed rest. After the land has rested, Spring comes and gives us beautiful flowers and trees, and the land is prepared to grow delicious foods for us and all of the animals. When the fields are ready to harvest, we appreciate the resting of the land, because of all the good things its gives to us.

Obama’s mother was a CIA operative in Indonesia.  She was trained at the East –West Center in Hawaii in both Russian and Indonesian . She volunteered to go into a dangerous zone where military coups occurred on a daily basis.                Obama’s grandmother worked in a bank in Hawaii that was a front for the CIA where she was in effect a ‘paymaster’ for CIA assets. This fact was also true of his maternal grandfather.                 So Obama who was sold as 'community organizer’ and Lecturer in Government had given of himself by also working as an asset for the CIA.  His mentor was none other than Peter Geitner,  the father of Tim Geitner, our present Secretary of the Treasury. Obama’s history was correctly blacked out for ‘national security reasons' which I don’t happen to agree. 

But he refused to answer when addressed in English and forbade the speaking of English in his home. His daughters understood very little German. (Their mother insisted that the girls speak only English in the home. She reasoned that the less they understood German, the less they would find out about the cruelty of their father.) Consequently, the four daughters grew up having little communion with their father. He never spoke to them except to curse them. His Gott verdammte came to be regarded as hello and good-bye. When very angry, he’d call the object of his temper, Du Russe! This he considered his most obscene expletive. He hated Austria. He hated America. Most of all he hated Russia. He had never been to that country and had never laid eyes on a Russian. No one understood his hatred of that dimly known country and its vaguely known people. This was the man who was Francie’s maternal grandfather. She hated him the way his daughters hated him. *

Better still now, the perfect conformity in appearance between a man of business from Combray of his generation and the Duc de Bouillon reminded me of what had already struck me so forcibly when I had seen Saint-Loup’s maternal grandfather, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, in a daguerreotype in which he was exactly similar, in dress, air and manner, to my great-uncle, that social, and even individual differences are merged when seen from a distance in the uniformity of an epoch. The truth is that the similarity of dress, and also the reflexion, from a person’s face, of the spirit of his age occupy so much more space than his caste, which bulks largely only in his own self-esteem and the imagination of other people, that in order to discover that a great nobleman of the time of Louis Philippe differs less from a citizen of the time of Louis Philippe than from a great nobleman of the time of Louis XV, it is not necessary to visit the galleries of the Louvre.

Here are pictures of the sources for Daoist mijue "master to disciple" oral teachings, as shown in the manuals used by Daoist masters themselves. The manuals are insufficient for the casual reader to use, the oral koujue explanations given on a personal one-to-one basis are essential. After seeing how Daoists from Longhu Shan,as well as foreign ("american") Dao for $$$ have falsified their use, I am reluctant to share them in full, until a true Qingwei or Zhengyi Grade five and above master ask to see them. The Qingwei (5 thunder-vajra") Daoist seen performing the purification mudra in image #5 below (a mudra shared by Daoists, Tendai Tantric Buddhists in Japan, and Tibetan masters) said when he had seen the manuals shown in pictures 1-4. "Where is the other half of the Thunder-Vajra manual?" Then I knew that it was OK to give it to him! He gave me his address in Jiangxi province; I intend to bring the mijue manual to him on my next trip to China, as Master Zhuang asked me to do, (before his death in 1976, an order given to his maternal great grandfather by the 61st Longhu Shan master, in 1868)! [Saso facebook post, May 7 2015]

One result of active imagination, according to some reports, is an increase in synchronistic and paranormal phenomena. 32 This was certainly true of Jung. In 1916, Jung again felt that something within wanted to get out. An eerie restlessness seemed to permeate his home. Jung, I have to say, was lucky to have his house in Küsnacht, where he retired to a room, his “intellectual cave,” decorated in colored glass, to commune with his interior voices; he demanded and got absolute silence, and neither his children nor Emma—nor even the maid—were allowed to enter.33 As his maternal grandfather did, Jung felt the presence of the dead. His children seemed to feel it, too. One daughter saw a strange white figure; another had her blankets snatched from her at night. His son drew a picture of a fisherman he had seen in a dream: a flaming chimney rose from the fisherman’s head, and a devil flew through the air, cursing the fisherman for stealing his fish. An angel warned the devil that he couldn’t hurt the fisherman because he only caught bad fish. Jung had yet to mention Philemon the Kingfisher to his family. Then, on a Sunday afternoon, the doorbell rang loudly when it was clear no one was there. The pressure increased and Jung finally demanded “What in the world is this?” Then he heard the voices. “We have come back from Jerusalem,” they said, “where we found not what we sought,” the beginning of one of the strangest works of “automatic writing,” Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead, which he attributed to “Basilides in Alexandria, the City where the East toucheth the West.

As our meeting came to a merciful end and we were readying to leave, I mentioned that the paternal grandfather and namesake of one of my staff traveling with us, Jan Karcz, had fought the Nazis as the general in charge of the Polish cavalry, then served with the underground resistance and had died at Auschwitz. Jan’s maternal grandfather had hidden two Jewish women in Warsaw, saving their lives, and his mother had served as a squad leader of teenage medics in Poland. Netanyahu’s demeanor changed instantly, and he asked us to be introduced to Jan.

It is certainly of service to a man to know who were his grandfathers and who were his grandmothers if he entertain an ambition to move in the upper circles of society, and also of service to be able to speak of them as of persons who were themselves somebodies in their time. No doubt we all entertain great respect for those who by their own energies have raised themselves in the world; and when we hear that the son of a washerwoman has become Lord Chancellor or Archbishop of Canterbury we do, theoretically and abstractedly, feel a higher reverence for such self-made magnate than for one who has been as it were born into forensic or ecclesiastical purple. But not the less must the offspring of the washerwoman have had very much trouble on the subject of his birth, unless he has been, when young as well as when old, a very great man indeed. After the goal has been absolutely reached, and the honour and the titles and the wealth actually won, a man may talk with some humour, even with some affection, of the maternal tub;

The surname Fletcher belonged to my maternal grandfather and was one that he held very proudly. It is the name I legally adopted as my own surname at age 15. Fletcher is an English surname meaning “arrow maker” that was given to medieval craftsmen who designed and crafted arrows.

Dusty, if you ever see any "Quicksand"---you can know that there is OIL somewhere very close to it.

Lonely and determined At 7:30 on the morning of June 28, 1971, Maye Musk gave birth to an eight-pound, eight-ounce boy with a very large head. At first she and Errol were going to name him Nice, after the town in France where he was conceived. History may have been different, or at least amused, if the boy had to go through life with the name Nice Musk. Instead, in the hope of making the Haldemans happy, Errol agreed that the boy would have names from that side of the family: Elon, after Maye’s grandfather J. Elon Haldeman, and Reeve, the maiden name of Maye’s maternal grandmother.

intriguing, not standard Hollywood stuff. He was not a street kid who’d had to claw his way to respectability. His reasonably well-to-do family’s roots traced back to George Washington’s mother, and he was always proud of the fact that he was distantly related to “one of the founders of our country.” Bill was Irish-English-German, “mixed in an American shaker,” as he liked to say. His maternal grandfather was a cousin of Warren G. Harding, twenty-ninth president of the United States. Bill had been born William Franklin Beedle Jr. in O’Fallon, Illinois, on April 17, 1918. When he was three, the family moved to Pasadena, California. His father, William, was an industrial chemist; his mother, Mary, a teacher. He had two younger brothers, Robert (Bob) Westfield Beedle, and Richard (Dick Porter) Beedle.

Edward Campbell Lowe was a radical in his blood and in his bones... his maternal grandfather had famously made a bonfire with a valuable portrait of the Marquess of Bute because, he had declared, it was more than a man could stomach to encounter a Tory every morning before breakfast.

At the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), we have worked with our international affiliate in Pakistan to combat the egregious international crimes that spring from this and other bigoted and intolerant cultures. One of our more high-profile cases revolves around Parwasha, an eight-year-old Christian girl in Pakistan whom Muslim men attacked in the public streets. Why? Because of the honor and shame culture. Here’s what happened. Parwasha’s maternal uncle, Iftikhar Masih, was visiting his Muslim girlfriend, Samina, late one night at her home. Interreligious romantic relationships are not accepted in Pakistan, largely due to the Muslim faith and the surrounding culture impacted by being predominantly Muslim. Therefore the girlfriend’s Muslim family was furious. Parwasha’s uncle admitted to the relationship and explained that he was invited over. But this did nothing to assuage the dishonor felt by Samina’s family, who called the village elders’ council. The family lied, telling the council that Iftikhar had robbed their house the night before and stolen a lot of money. Iftikhar told the council the true story. But the Muslim family decided that their honor had been besmirched. In their minds, the only way to correct this would be by humiliating a woman in the Christian family. So when young Parwasha was walking home from school the next day, they kidnapped her, stripped her naked, beat her, and left her in the streets. When Parwasha’s family sought help from the village elders (who were Muslim), they didn’t respond. When Parwasha’s grandfather went to the police station to file charges, he discovered that the Muslim family had already filed trumped-up charges against his family, charging them with assaulting and shaming Samina. The local police arrested members of Parwasha’s family and detained them until the village elders’ council could work everything out between the Muslim and Christian families. The council determined that the Christian family would have to sell its property and leave the area within thirty days. This is a common punishment doled out to non-Muslim families who are targeted by Muslims angry at them for any given reason.

The bond that developed between my maternal grandfather and I was the strongest, more than any other of my siblings or relatives, t. It was from his passing that I experienced firsthand the impermanent quality and fragility of our lives at a very early age. This would serve as a constant reminder to treat others with a bit more care and concern later in my life.

From the day I was born, more than any other of my siblings, the bond that developed between my maternal grandfather and I was strongest. Within the brief few years, my grandfather passed, and it was through his passing that I experienced firsthand the impermanent quality and fragility of our lives, reminding me to treat others with a bit more care and concern later in life.

More than any other of my siblings or relatives, the bond that developed between my maternal grandfather and I, from the day I was born, was the strongest. It was from his passing after a few brief short years that I experienced at a very early age firsthand the impermanent quality and fragility of our lives. This would serve as a constant reminder to treat others with a bit more care and concern later in my life.

From the day I was born, more than any other of my siblings or relatives, the bond that developed between my maternal grandfather and I was the strongest. It was from his passing at a very early age after a few brief short years that I experienced firsthand the impermanent quality and fragility of our lives. This would serve as a constant reminder to treat others with a bit more care and concern later in my life.

From the day I was born, more than any other of my siblings or relatives, the bond that developed between my maternal grandfather and I was strongest. Within a brief few years, my grandfather passed, and it was through his passing that I experienced firsthand at a very early age the impermanent quality and fragility of our lives. This would serve as a constant reminder to treat others with a bit more care and concern later in my life.

More than any other of my siblings or relatives, the bond that developed between my maternal grandfather and I from the day I was born was the strongest. Within a brief few years my grandfather passed, and it was through his passing that I experienced firsthand at a very early age the impermanent quality and fragility of our lives. This would serve as a constant reminder to treat others with a bit more care and concern later in my life.

More than any other of my siblings or relatives, the bond that developed between my maternal grandfather and I, from the day I was born, was the strongest. My grandfather would go on to pass in a few brief short years, and it was through his passing that I experienced firsthand at a very early age the impermanent quality and fragility of our lives. This would serve as a constant reminder to treat others with a bit more care and concern later in my life.

IN 1957 JOHN WEST left Marcle School and went to work on the farm with Fred and their father. Life as an unskilled labourer was poorly paid, but the West boys could expect nothing better. Their father had been a farm worker all his life, as had their maternal grandfather, William Hill, and his father before him; there was no reason to hope or think that John and Fred would ever do anything else. An acquaintance of Fred’s at the time, Patrick Meredith, says that he fully expected Fred to be ‘walking behind a cow with a stick for the rest of his life’.

For my maternal grandmother, who lives with us for a few months every year, that line came as an incredible relief. For her, it was personal. She and my grandfather grew up in Czechoslovakia during the very worst of communism. Unlike most of these new-age Starbucks-chugging socialists in Brooklyn, they knew the horrors that can come from a state-run economy, and the scars of socialism are seared in her memory. I vividly remember speaking with her during the lead-up to the 2016 election, when she was watching neo-socialists such as Bernie Sanders on CNN almost every day. (We’re working on getting her off the CNN train, by the way. But back in the Czech Republic, you pick up CNN early, like a drug addiction. Soon she’ll be watching Fox with the rest of the sane people in the world.) “Don, don’t these people understand?” she asked, her voice quavering, tears coming to her eyes. This is a woman who hid from Nazis in the basement of her farmhouse as a child and lived under Communist occupation for decades. At ninety-three, she’s still stronger and tougher than most. But she feared that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren might go through some of the same things she went through, and the thought of that had scared the hell out of her. “They don’t know how bad it can be. Please do something. Don’t they know this is all lies?

Giovanni, in love with her unabashed feminine strength and her reconciliation of love and revolution. I spent nearly every waking moment around Nikki, and I loved her dearly. But sibling relationships are often fraught with petty tortures. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her. But I had. At the time, I couldn’t understand my mother’s anger. I mean this wasn’t really a woman I was punching. This was Nikki. She could take it. Years would pass before I understood how that blow connected to my mom’s past. My mother came to the United States at the age of three. She was born in Lowe River in the tiny parish of Trelawny, Jamaica, hours away from the tourist traps that line the coast. Its swaths of deep brush and arable land made it great for farming but less appealing for honeymoons and hedonism. Lowe River was quiet, and remote, and it was home for my mother, her older brother Ralph, and my grandparents. My maternal great-grandfather Mas Fred, as he was known, would plant a coconut tree at his home in Mount Horeb, a neighboring area, for each of his kids and grandkids when they were born. My mom always bragged that hers was the tallest and strongest of the bunch. The land that Mas Fred and his wife, Miss Ros, tended had been cared for by our ancestors for generations. And it was home for my mom until her parents earned enough money to bring the family to the States to fulfill my grandfather’s dream of a theology degree from an American university. When my mom first landed in the Bronx, she was just a small child, but she was a survivor and learned quickly. She studied the other kids at school like an anthropologist, trying desperately to fit in. She started with the way she spoke. She diligently listened to the radio from the time she was old enough to turn it on and mimicked what she heard. She’d always pull back enough in her interactions with her classmates to give herself room to quietly observe them, so that when she got home she could practice imitating their accents, their idiosyncrasies, their style. Words like irie became cool. Constable became policeman. Easy-nuh became chill out. The melodic, swooping movement of her Jamaican patois was quickly replaced by the more stable cadences of American English. She jumped into the melting pot with both feet. Joy Thomas entered American University in Washington, D.C., in 1968, a year when she and her adopted homeland were both experiencing

Her maternal grandfather is South Indian, her grandmother is Scottish, her dad is an ethnically ambiguous Californian, and she has roots in all those places like I do.

Jancsi was a formidable mental calculator even as a child. Some sources suggest that he could multiply two eight-digit numbers together in his head when he was six. These abilities, remarkable enough to astonish his early tutors, may have been partly inherited from his maternal grandfather. Though Jacob Kann had no formal education beyond secondary school, he could add or multiply numbers into the millions. Von Neumann would recall his twinkly-eyed grandfather’s mental gymnastics with pride when he was older, but he admitted he was never quite able to match them himself.

Among his peers, Pablo Guzmán had a unique upbringing. He graduated from one of New York’s premier academic high schools, Bronx Science, where students were engaged with the political debates of the day, from the Vietnam War to the meaning of black power, thanks to the influence of a history teacher. Guzmán had also been politicized by his Puerto Rican father and maternal grandfather, who was Cuban. Both saw themselves as members of the black diaspora in the Americas. The job discrimination and racist indignities they endured in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and in New York turned them into race men committed to the politics of black pride and racial uplift. When Guzmán was a teenager, his father took him to Harlem to hear Malcolm X speak.188 He also remembers that his Afro-Cuban grandfather, Mario Paulino, regularly convened meetings at his home to discuss world politics with a circle of friends, many of whom were likely connected through their experience at the Tuskegee Institute, the historic black American school of industrial training, to which Paulino had applied from Cuba and at which he enrolled in the early 1920s.189 Perhaps because of the strong black politics of his household, Guzmán identified strongly with the black American community, considered joining the BPP, and called himself “Paul.” His “field studies” in Cuernavaca, Mexico, during his freshman year at SUNY Old Westbury, however, awakened him to the significance of his Latin American roots.

(JOHN talking to his UNCLE FRANK BASS) "UNCLE FRANK, you don't laugh like you used to..." UNCLE FRANK: "JOHN, things are just not as funny as they used to be...

If doubt has brought you to this page, you probably need a little genealogical cheat-sheet: Kimiâ Sadr, the narrator. Leïli Sadr, Kimiâ’s oldest sister. Mina Sadr, the younger sister. Sara Sadr (née Tadjamol), Kimiâ’s mother. Darius Sadr, Kimiâ’s father. Born in 1925 in Qazvin, he is the fourth son of Mirza-Ali Sadr and Nour. The Sadr uncles (six official ones, plus one more): Uncle Number One, the eldest, prosecuting attorney in Tehran. Uncle Number Two (Saddeq), responsible for managing the family lands in Mazandaran and Qazvin. Keeper of the family history. Uncle Number Three, notary. Uncle Number Five, manager of an electrical appliance shop near the Grand Bazar. Uncle Number Six (Pirouz), professor of literature at the University of Tehran. Owner of one of the largest real estate agencies in the city. Abbas, Uncle Number Seven (in a way). Illegitimate son of Mirza-Ali and a Qazvin prostitute. Nour, paternal grandmother of Kimiâ, whom her six sons call Mother. Born a few minutes after her twin sister, she was the thirtieth child of Montazemolmolk, and the only one to inherit her father’s blue eyes, the same shade of blue as the Caspian Sea. She died in 1971, the day of Kimiâ’s birth. Mirza-Ali, paternal grandfather. Son and grandson of wealthy Qazvin merchants; he was the only one of the eleven children of Rokhnedin Khan and Monavar Banou to have turquoise eyes the color of the sky over Najaf, the city of his birth. He married Nour in 1911 in order to perpetuate a line of Sadrs with blue eyes. Emma Aslanian, maternal grandmother of Kimiâ and mother of Sara. Her parents, Anahide and Artavaz Aslanian, fled Turkey shortly before the Armenian genocide in 1915. The custom of reading coffee grounds was passed down to her from her grandmother Sévana. Montazemolmolk, paternal great-grandfather of Kimiâ and father of Nour. Feudal lord born in Mazandaran. Parvindokht, one of Montazemolmolk’s many daughters; sister of Nour. Kamran Shiravan, son of one of Mirza-Ali’s sisters and Ebrahim Shiravan. Cousin of Darius . . .

Yá’át’ééh,” I say, using my formal voice. “My name is Nizhoni Begay. My mother’s clan is Towering House. My father’s clan is Bitter Water. My maternal grandfather’s clan is the Mud People clan, and my paternal grandfather’s clan is the Crystal Rock people.

My name is Eugene Debs Hartke, and I was born in 1940. I was named at the behest of my maternal grandfather, Benjamin Wills, who was a Socialist and an Atheist, and nothing but a groundskeeper at Butler University, in Indianapolis, Indiana, in honor of Eugene Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana. Debs was a Socialist and a Pacifist and a Labor Organizer who ran several times for the Presidency of the United States of America, and got more votes than has any other candidate nominated by a third party in the history of this country.

Above all, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is about the missing story of the mother. Tom Marvolo Riddle was named after his father and maternal grandfather, but we learn his mother Merope’s story to understand why Voldemort chose Harry to mark as his equal. Severus Snape bears the surname of his Muggle father, but in his magical textbook, he names himself after his witch mother, Eileen Prince. Harry hears about his father’s friends and about his mother herself, but on the topic of Harry’s mother’s friends, everyone is conspicuously silent.

My maternal grandparents, Dr. Peter P. Cobbs (1892–1960), and Rosa Mashaw Cobbs (1899–1989), and their children, who were born in Los Angeles—Prince (1925–2019), Marcelyn (1927–95), and Price (1928–2018)—bore witness to this time, due to a decision to migrate to Los Angeles, California, from Montgomery, Alabama, in 1925, to begin new lives and start their own family. Upon their arrival, my grandfather was one of the few black physicians in the city, and my grandmother had a teaching degree.

my lifetime. My maternal grandparents, Dr. Peter P. Cobbs (1892–1960), and Rosa Mashaw Cobbs (1899–1989), and their children, who were born in Los Angeles—Prince (1925–2019), Marcelyn (1927–95), and Price (1928–2018)—bore witness to this time, due to a decision to migrate to Los Angeles, California, from Montgomery, Alabama, in 1925, to begin new lives and start their own family. Upon their arrival, my grandfather was one of the few black physicians in the city,

She had only one really cool find through her research, but it was a beauty. Lily Mullin, their father’s Irish immigrant maternal great-grandmother, had been a cook at the home of one of Philadelphia’s most prominent families. She’d disappeared from the household at the next census, but Natalie later discovered her in the home of her great-great-grandfather, John McKeller—as his wife. How, Natalie mused, did one rise from a young cook’s apprentice—sixteen years old!—to become the wife of a man who was heir to a fortune and years older? Whatever the story, she was certain it was a romantic one: Lily and John had gone on to have nine children, all of whom were alive to celebrate their parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.