Hello from the Heartland. My name is Jenna and this is Smarter News, news when it matters and why it matters. Our Smarter series features unique people who help us think and live smarter.

So I want to start this conversation off a little bit different with a bit of a personal story.

So my mother is first generation Italian-American.

Her father, my grandfather, was born in Italy.

And he came through Ellis Island with my great-grandmother as a little baby.

In fact, she traveled with two, two little babies,

I would say, a toddler and an infant, which was my my grandfather. And I just want to note,

I have trouble enough getting all my kids in the car to go to Target, let alone getting on a ship

from Italy, traveling for more than a week to America to go through Ellis Island and wind

up in California where my mother's family eventually settled. But as part of my mother's history,

there's a couple images that are really salient in my mind that she has had in her bedroom over the

years. And her bedroom is not a place that I went very often as a kid. You know, it's your parents' room. There's a lot of important stuff in there. And some of the

important stuff really illuminates this history. So she has a trunk that my great grandmother and

her father carried through Ellis Island. She has some rosaries, things like that that called mine her Italian Catholic heritage. And then she has this, this print. And she's always had this print of Betsy Ross sewing the first American flag. And there was just something about this print that always spoke to me. I just thought it was beautiful.

It's got the image of this big flag on the lap of Betsy Ross and she's sewing this flag.

And it was just something really special that really stuck in my mind. A good lesson to parents everywhere.

You never know what your, you know, your kids are really going to pick up because I don't know if my mom would think, oh, yeah, that's what she's going to remember from the bedroom, right? But I remember that so clearly.

And really, for most of my life, I thought Betsy Ross, so the first American flag.

I mean, that's what we've always talked about.

Betsy Ross, so the first American flag.

And it wasn't until I started to do some more reporting on smarter

news and where we look into some historical dates like Flag Day that I stumbled upon the wording

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