In 1915, a dozen eggs cost about 34 cents, a gallon of milk was 18 cents, and that pound of coffee you’d pay 8 to 10 dollars for today cost just 30 cents. Dedicated gas stations were a new phenomenon and gas was sold mostly as a side-business by drug stores. Canned beer had not yet been invented and the Star Spangled Banner had not yet been officially adopted as our national anthem. As different as life was in 1915, some things were much the same as today.

If you were to ask my mom when was the first moment she worried that I might be headed down the wrong path, maybe to a life of crime, she would have a couple events to choose from. She might tell you about the time in the summer before I entered 3rd grade when I decided to play with fire.

In the summer of 1957, a just-founded independent film company shot their first feature film in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in the small communities of Downingtown, Phoenixville, and several others. The movie was intended to be a low-budget scream feature to satisfy teenage drive-in audiences, and the title changed at various points in its development — it was originally to be known as The Molten Meteor, with the filmmakers later deciding The Glob would be a good title. Eventually it became the title most of us recognize today — The Blob.

I was just a kid, maybe 7 years old, when my mom first told me about my uncle Jimmy. Apparently we met once when I was just a baby, but I was too young to remember. He was my mom’s older brother — half-brother in truth, because he had a different father — and had led a very troubled life.

“You have an uncle Jimmy who’s in jail,” my mom told me one day. I didn’t have the intellectual capacity to understand the implications of what she was telling me at that time, and I didn’t ask many questions, but I was raised with the knowledge that I had an uncle who was incarcerated.

It was Christmas of 2016 when my wife, Rebecca, bought me an Ancestry DNA kit. She’s a genealogy nut and knew I was interested in tracing my family tree one day. In all honesty, I didn’t think I would come up with much because my family background is rough.

The last time my mother saw her father was the day the police came to take him to jail. It was two weeks before Christmas, December 11, 1956, and a warmer than average day in Chester, Pennsylvania, a city on the northwest bank of the Delaware River, about midway between Philadelphia and Wilmington. The mercury rose to 53 degrees that day, and I like to imagine my mother, Linda, played outside and enjoyed what might have been the last balmy day before winter arrived for good. She was only five years old, so we can’t rely on memory to know for sure.