Vicki Entreken

“You’re NOT a Victoria. Just Vicki.”

One day, I might have been about ten, Mom was cutting carrots in the kitchen. I asked her if my full name was Victoria. I’d had a friend at school whose name was Victoria and she went by the nickname Vicki like me. Victoria sounded so elegant, like a Queen, or like that pretty Victoria …

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DNA will uncover family secrets, but are you ready?

Inheritance author Dani Shapiro will be in St. Petersburg on Saturday!  Readers of genealogy stories, you must have read her memoir, Inheritance, right? Dani Shapiro’s story, triggered by a DNA test that changes her life, is the latest example of the kind of upheaval today’s technology can bring. Shapiro, author of five memoirs and five novels, …

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Practicing Provenance

As a kid, I used to scrawl my name inside the cover of all of my books. As a teenager, I did the same with record albums. There would be no mistake that Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing” was mine. Little did I know then that these inscriptions would be a form of documentation for future …

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