Editor’s Note: In this introduction to the talk I gave at our gala Reunion dinner, I set out to explain to the assembled how they were all related to one another. With the lockdown’s separation of families still on everyone’s mind, there seemed complete agreement when I quoted my mother’s sister Martha Gwinn Casey as once exclaiming to me, “Aren’t families wonderful!”

Beyond this, everyone also seemed ready to think a bit about long gone ancestors. Novelist William Faulkner’s comment on accepting his Nobel Prize for Literature seemed to fit the evening like a glove, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past!”