Hailing from the Midwest, Sweden, Canada, and Ireland, my immediate ancestors may have been the most dissimilar collection of human beings ever assembled.
Yet, as different as they were individually, they had something extraordinary in common: their lives neatly bracketed the entirety of the 20th century. A period of unprecedented innovation, conflict, discovery, and change. A period when forces never before experienced moved them in directions no one could have foreseen-and they have the stories to prove it.