Out of the blue, I got an email from the curator of Stonehurst, a historic property designed by H.H. Richardson in Waltham outside Boston. She was enquiring whether I had any family papers relating to my step-grandmother, Ethel Paine Moors, who was brought up in Stonehurst and died ten days after marrying my grandfather in the year that I was born (she was dead by the time my parents went to meet her off the boat from Southampton). I could supply no information, but have discovered in return that she was a fiery liberal who devoted her life to teaching in African American schools, including Penn School in St. Helena, South Carolina. It was her family trust, not Rockefeller or the Ford Foundation, which funded one of the early civil rights conferences in 1957 at which Martin Luther King gave an historic speech later published ‘At the Threshold of Integration’.