Some people can’t believe in themselves until someone else believes in them first.
— Good Will Hunting

My grandmother had a small two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a building in Youngstown, Ohio. My parents would drop me off for a visit, and Grandma Myers and I would spend several days, just the two of us. We would visit Mill Creek Park and walk through the extensive flower gardens.

Each visit, I would perch on one of her two couches, and look through old loose photographs, older generations of Shumakers and Myers intermingling with newer ones in the disorganized drawer of her breakfront. She would sit beside me, naming people, so that I learned my family’s faces without ever meeting most of them. After several years, I knew who they all were myself. I loved looking through those photographs, most of them black and white, seeing my mother as she grew up.

On…