ROOTS & BRANCHES

Every inactive cemetery should have someone as interested in the people who are or were buried there as Joseph F. Harrison III is about the St. Stephen’s Catholic Cemetery in the Nicetown section of Philadelphia. Harrison has family connections to St. Stephen’s Roman Catholic Church—his father was baptized there in 1925—as well as a great-great-grandmother …

Keen readers of the “Roots & Branches” column will likely remember that your columnist likes pride himself as a “half Gutenberg, half digital” guy who always makes sure he’s at least two iPhone models behind the current one. So, a couple of words that tend to make me a flinch are “app” and “the cloud”—the …

Recently I needed some airplane reading so picked up a Life magazine edition titled “Anne Frank: The Diary at 70: Her Life and Her Legacy.” Anne Frank, of course, is the Jewish teenager who died in a Nazi death camp along with her entire family—save her father, Otto, who returned to where they had hidden …