Family History

Amid the many messages you will hear about screening for prostate cancer in the coming days, I hope these stand out: There is at best a small potential benefit from prostate cancer screening, and there are substantial known harms. We need a better test, and we need better treatment options. The panel I chair, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, has just issued a recommendation against screening men of any age for prostate cancer using the prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, blood test.

The photo album, covered in worn green velvet and held together with ornate brass hinges, lay in a jumble of lace and candlesticks on an old table. It was, like everything else in the hall, a piece of used goods, the refuse of previous owners. Or, if you prefer, an antique. I opened the album the way someone in the market for a new home might read the real-estate listings. Was this property something that would suit my family? I thought no more of the former owners than I might have thought of the family who planted the tree in the backyard or added the dormers to the roof of a house for sale.

As long as there has been a county called Gloucester, there have been Tomlinsons in Gloucester County. But their 300 years in South Jersey do not seem like very long for the Tomlinsons of this century. Family members talk easily and with conviction about relatives who lived more than 100 years ago, as though they knew them personally, as though the events of their ancestors' lives occurred just yesterday. On Saturday, the Tomlinsons took part in what is for other families a summertime ritual but for them was quite out of the ordinary.

While the procedure that Today show viewers can watch Katie Couric get this morning - a colonoscopy - is considered the best test for colorectal cancers, few doctors recommend it for patients her age who have no family history or symptoms of the disease. A taped segment on the 43-year-old Couric having the procedure, which involves threading a flexible tube with a lighted viewing device through the rectum and into the large intestine, is scheduled to be broadcast between 8 and 8:30 a.m. It is part of a series on colon and rectal cancers that runs all week.

At 3 o'clock yesterday afternoon, Hersey Gray could hear the wind rustling through the soybean fields across the street from his house. Aside from the occasional car passing by, the country lane in front of his home was deserted. Hours earlier, more than 100 relatives had swarmed around his property, hugging and saying their goodbyes as the 20th Walls family reunion came to an end. "This year was different," said Monica Hernandez, who came from Baltimore with her husband, Eduardo, and daughters for the weekend reunion.

The FBI agent sauntered through the hallways of Abington Friends School, his badge in one hand, a cigar in the other. His mustache was fading beneath his nose, but with his hat tilted rakishly to one side, everyone knew he meant business. Still, he was shorter than most detectives. And his pants were rolled up above his shoes. "He looks better than I did," retired FBI agent Paul Nolan said of the impostor - his 9-year-old grandson and namesake. The younger Paul Nolan was in character, as were 39 other students, for the opening of the Third Grade Museum of Family History.

Paula Woodton, 8 and grinning, pored over faded photographs with her grandmother. Christopher Bonner, also 8 and also grinning, heard his 80-year-old grandfather explain the tale of a knee buckle - a fastener for old-style breeches - owned by the family for 250 years. Tales and family talk were the themes yesterday at the William Meredith Elementary School, 5th and Fitzwater streets. New York Newsday Editor Bill Zimmerman spoke to Meredith students about how to conduct oral histories and then the students gathered histories from visiting grandparents and parents.

Teaching at a university Writing Center, I see reams of student essays on issues such as abortion, capital punishment, NAFTA, AIDS. After a while it gets numbing, for everyone. But recently, a history student came to the center, excited by a different assignment. It was to show the effect of major events of the century on two generations of his family. I wanted to cheer for this student, kiss his professor, and ASAP, talk to my own family. This is the season to do it. When do most of us see Mom and Dad, Uncle Jack, Cousin Marvin and Grandma Rosa, the ones who know the dirt, the stories, the family history?

A framed photograph of a handsome young man in a Confederate Army uniform was next to his discharge papers, dated 1865. Nearby were a bayonet from the Spanish American War and a three-ring binder filled with mementos of the life of Maj. George Fisher, killed in World War II in the Philippines. These and about a dozen other artifacts were on a table in the community room at Abington Free Library on Tuesday as the Old York Road Genealogical Society gathered for its annual "show-and-tell" night, when people could bring in family treasures to share.

The undeveloped farmland rolling alongside the Pennsylvania Railroad's Main Line appealed to the Rev. Thomas Kyle. A 2 1/2-story stone house, for sale along with 197 acres of open fields and woodlands, seemed the perfect retreat for the Catholics living on the noisy and grimy streets of Philadelphia in the 1840s. So for $18,000, he and his Augustinian brothers bought the property, then called Belle-Air, and planted the seeds for what would soon become Villanova College.

Amid the many messages you will hear about screening for prostate cancer in the coming days, I hope these stand out: There is at best a small potential benefit from prostate cancer screening, and there are substantial known harms. We need a better test, and we need better treatment options. The panel I chair, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, has just issued a recommendation against screening men of any age for prostate cancer using the prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, blood test.

It might be remiss to the point of dishonesty to write about the Irish and Irish Americans without mentioning "the powerful weakness" that has stalked them for centuries. It is the stereotype that is sometimes politely left unspoken and at others maliciously or humorously blurted out. I never knew my maternal grandfather. He died at the age of 51, five years before I was born. But although I never saw him, I have seen his ghost in the lives of my mother, her siblings, and their children.

By Nathan Englander Alfred A. Knopf. 207 pp. $24.95 Reviewed by David L. Ulin Give Nathan Englander credit for chutzpah. The title of his new book of short fiction, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank , draws on two iconic antecedents: the young diarist who died at Bergen-Belsen and the Raymond Carver story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. " Each, in its way, informs the collection; each, in its way, helps to set the terms. And what are those terms?

A big sign off Route 73 in Winslow Township once directed music lovers into what seemed like just a wooded area with a few houses. But several blocks back, there was a seminal source of entertainment for mid-20th century African Americans, who often were excluded from mainstream events. "Back in those woods was my Daddy's Tippin Inn," said Helen Toomer Beverly, 76. "You turned off 73 and within a block, you could hear the music and smell my mother's fried chicken. Buses would come from Philadelphia and Atlantic City.

Looking for proof that there is no such thing as a coincidence? Take the intersecting lives of Georgie Woods and the Hoods of East Falls. Woods, legendary Philadelphia radio personality and activist, went to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. So did the Hoods, who are Quakers and have been active in social-justice causes for . . . centuries. Woods pushed for the desegregation of Girard College. So did the Hoods. Now, their paths are crossing again. Councilman Curtis Jones Jr. has proposed renaming the Robin Hood Dell East amphitheater to honor Woods.

By Ted Silary silaryt@phillynews.com In a crowded corner of St. Joseph's Prep's basketball locker room, long after much of the excitement had ebbed, coach William "Speedy" Morris finally got the chance to address his players. First things first: There'd be practice today. No one booed or even groaned. Then he noted, "Too much of this is on me. " Well, sir, the spotlight tends to resemble the sun when a guy garners his nine hundredth career coaching victory.

By Steve Frank When the good Republicans of Iowa rewarded the sheer doggedness of Rick Santorum's 99-county campaign last week, the Republican presidential campaign took an oddly personal turn for me. The ensuing "week of the sweater vest" in national politics connected me - or at least the contents of my closet - to one of the GOP candidates for the first time. We will soon find out whether Santorum's Iowa momentum will pay dividends in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and beyond.

GRAPEVINE, Texas - Police in a quiet Fort Worth suburb worked yesterday to piece together a family history after a man dressed in a Santa Claus suit apparently shot six relatives and himself on Christmas. Grapevine police spokesman Sgt. Robert Eberling said that the shooter showed up in the costume shortly before gunfire erupted, and that the family appeared to have been opening Christmas presents. Police responding to a 9-1-1 call found four females and three males dead. They also found two handguns.

We've managed to acquire a remarkable family Hanukkah gift: a ship's manifest, an official passenger log that tracks my late mother-in-law's voyage to America in 1920. It's a taproot to family history, part of our clan's collective "Coming to America" story. Had she not made that voyage, nothing would be the same. Hinda Rubache came to these shores and through Ellis Island as a young woman of 22. She sailed from the city of Minsk in Russia, though her immigration papers say Poland because of the ever-changing borders.

Last week the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force - a panel of independent experts - found that healthy men need no longer undergo PSA screens for prostate cancer because the tests don't save lives and lead to harm from unnecessary care. Curtis Miyamoto, chair of radiation oncology at Temple University Hospital, discussed the issues with Trishula Patel. Question: What is the PSA test, and what do you think of the new recommendations? Miyamoto: PSA, which stands for prostate-specific antigen, is actually found normally in men's bodies.