1914

How's this for a name? Edwin Flavel Kortright Farrington. Pretty posh, huh? My maternal grandmother's father (known as "Flavel" by his family) was born in Colon (uh, and that's pronounced like Ko-LOHN, not . . . you know, the other way), Panama in 1890. Actually, Panama was still part of Colombia at that time. Anyway, his parents were well-off; his father was involved in the shipping business in the Caribbean, and his mother was descended from French Huguenots who had settled and become socially and politically prominent on the West Indian island of Montserrat.

Daphne Silvera, my great-grandmother, was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1896, the daughter of Theodore, who was the son of a wealthy Jamaican family of Jewish heritage, and Deborah, a woman born on St. Thomas in the (then) Danish Virgin Islands, and whose family were prominent in the Jewish community on the island.

Anyway, these two crazy kids -- Flav and Daph -- were married in Colon on August 26, 1914. They lived in Panama for several years before moving to the United States in 1924. Great-grandma died in 1984, just three months shy of their 70th wedding anniversary, and great-grandpa died a year later.