While working on a memoir about my grandparents, John and Nannie Palmer, who married in 189I,  I found a quip I’d saved by Bill Moyers which seems apropos. “The past is no row of bare facts waiting to be memorized by school children. Nor does it stand in our back yard like an old picket fence, slowly and silently moving. The past is a real world inhabited by villains and heroes and regular folk passing this way on swift journeys. Their story is our story–the tie that binds each generation to all the others.”