Photographs form a large part of the source material. There are hundreds of them, spilling from tattered envelopes and pasted into leatherette-bound albums, or framed in torn cardboard or peeling gilt. Among them are faces I haven’t seen in years, faces I’d sooner forget, faces that hint at a family history that extends back further than my own experience. Ghosts benign and malicious, ancestors in the uniforms of war, correspondents from foreign lands whose lessons went unheeded.