“I grew up in [a] small Palestinian Arab village 25 miles northwest of Nazareth. My dad was a farmer and my mother, a housewife, but she helped in everything. I have five sisters and two brothers. It was a small neighborhood. Everybody knew…

"As I mentioned earlier, Dunkirk is on the shore of Lake Erie. Our house was just a few houses away from the shoreline. Swimming was the most important activity for us. We would go as often as possible throughout the day, practically every day. Up…

“(My father) moved to Denmark. He was an engineer. My dad worked for Curtiss Wright for a government contract near Clearfield, Pennsylvania. (Their neighborhood) was just sidewalks…(a) Beaver Cleaver kind of neighborhood. We knew about (the POW…

“Their mother died and so, when these children (Monica and Tonneke) were left motherless then someone fostered them, and they were sort of offered to my mother and my grandmother…So my grandmother said ‘well sure we’ll take them’ because that means…

“She had a younger brother five years younger and his name was Hans. They were going back and forth between Indonesia and the Netherlands, she and her brother, because my grandmother and grandfather felt they needed what they called 'a proper…

"I don’t know if my grandfather’s whole family came at the same time, but I believe he came in 1909 and he was the second of I think there were nine children, several of them died in fires and maybe there was a stillbirth, but I believe there…

"Mother and Dad started dating again after the war, and with Grandma Fred’s coaxing and Mother’s proposal they were married and started a family right away. We three children were born two years apart. So my parents went from the war to domesticity.…

"I grew up in the South but I couldn’t wait to get as far away from that Southern lifestyle as I could get. So, I moved to California, lived there twenty years, flew to Honolulu for ten years. Got as far away as I could get. Then Bob’s business…

"After my dad’s father died from a measles epidemic, his large family of five siblings and his now single mother Frederica lost her farm during the Depression. During the war, Dad’s sisters went to work. The older sister married…

"We descend from one of the largest intact plantations in Georgia: The William Harris Homestead on Highway 11 in Monroe, Georgia. In 1825, my mother’s great grandpa William Harris started the homestead on 500 acres acquired in a treaty with the…