My great-great-grandmother Esther grew up in Eastern Europe and spent the later years

of her life in South Philadelphia.

She naturalized that the immigration station on Washington Avenue, which was kind of like

Philadelphia's Ellis Island point of entry for mostly Eastern European immigrants at

the turn of the 20th century.

She settled a few blocks away with her family.

In 1918, my great-great-grandmother Esther died.

She died in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and died in the midst of

caring for family.

I knew some of the details, but it really kind of floated through family lore.

There wasn't a big reference point, not just in our own family, but in our culture,

about what that pandemic meant for life in the city.

So at the onset of our pandemic, I had a conversation with organizers of an exhibition

here in Philadelphia, the Mooter Museum, who had opened an exhibition a year before our

most recent pandemic.

About the thousands of lives lost in Philadelphia in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

They had pulled death certificates from anyone who had died of influenza or related causes.

And it was in conversation with one of their curators that they presented me with this

record of my great-great-grandmother.

It says she passed away in October of 1918 of pneumonia that was on set from influenza.

It lists her family members, it lists where she was buried.

What I was gathering about the past, my family, was that a group of, at that point, fairly

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