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Category: Real Stories

The Stories We Become: Tips for Tracing Your Genealogical Roots

The Stories We Become: Tips for Tracing Your Genealogical Roots

by Lauren Jonik Family—blood or chosen—helps us to orient in the world and find our place by understanding not only where we come from, but where we have the potential to go. My passion for genealogy was ignited on a rainy day in my 10th year. My grandmother and aunt had prepared a booklet listing all of the relatives and ancestors dating back to my great-grandparents. Suddenly, my Irish, German and Polish heritage took on a new dimension. I began…

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Bessie, Willa, and Janet: Unsung Heroines in Aviation History

Bessie, Willa, and Janet: Unsung Heroines in Aviation History

by Demress Stockman I have always been fascinated by explorers and pioneers in history. I think about their incredible courage and persistence to go where nobody else they knew had gone, their desire to know and accomplish things, and their visions for the future that must have driven them in the face of incredible obstacles. Black History Month and Women’s History Month make up a two-month period of time for me to reflect on the achievements of people who have not…

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Growing up at the Mall

Growing up at the Mall

by Trish Cantillon “What do they want? Why do they come here?” Fran asks Stephen on the roof of the Monroeville Mall in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. “Some kind of instinct. Memory. What they used to do.This was an important place in their lives,” he answers. His 1978 film depicts zombie teenagers invading the local mall. Almost forty years later, it seems as though the roles have been reversed. The malls are now the zombies—half dead shells…

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Good Taste and Bad Food: In Search of Comfort in the 1980s

Good Taste and Bad Food: In Search of Comfort in the 1980s

by Leslie Pietrzyk While I was coming of age in the 80s, Tab was comfort food. The pink can of diet soda was practically an accessory for the girls on my Midwestern university campus. Even if you weren’t in a sorority, you wanted to give the impression that you could be, that you were the one who sniffed, no thanks, not them. It was comforting that one pink can allowed a girl like me to appear to fit in. I…

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Hepatitis B: Living with a Mystery

Hepatitis B: Living with a Mystery

by Katherine Clarke So often, when I tell people I have chronic Hepatitis B, they become very serious. Of course they do — it’s a serious disease. But I know without asking them that they are really thinking of Hepatitis C. (The confusion is understandable. The names differ by one letter, but the illnesses are very different.) And when they ask, “but don’t they have a cure for that, now?” I sigh, because there are 800,000-1.4 million people in the United…

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