You may have guessed that the above is not a picture of me. The young woman on the right is my paternal grandmother, with her brothers and parents. Anyone who knows me takes one look at this picture and immediately says "You look just like her!"

I grew up in a family that did not do conflict well. At any given time, some members of the family would, for whatever reason, not be talking to one another. On both sides of the family. And this had been going on forever. In fact, my father used to joke that there had been one family disagreement that had carried on for 300 years! (It was true, too. Many years later a Spanish archive kindly sent me 2kg of photocopied court documents and a microfilm to prove it!)

My family did, however, value its history. My Spanish father in particular was immensely proud of his heritage and had a large chest full of old family documents. Mostly, they dealt with land transactions and inheritances and the oldest dated from 1599! As a teenager I spent hours with my father poring over documents like the one in the picture on the left. (The picture below is me with my dad, ca 1963.)