Opinion|We Should Claim Our Disabled Ancestors With Pride
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/27/opinion/disabled-ancestry-family-pride.html
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Guest Essay
We Should Claim Our Disabled Ancestors With Pride
Feb. 27, 2022
Credit…Illustration by The New York Times; Photography by eyenigelen, magda_istock, Olympia Valla, Lady-Photo, and Sara Lynn Paige via Getty Images
By Jennifer Natalya Fink
I’m searching the basement of my grandparents’ cavernous Long Island house, looking for my lost cousin in the boxes of old photo albums stored there. I am 7 years old. “Cousin,” I call, wishing I knew his name. “Cousin?” The details are vague. I know he’s a boy, that he has an extra chromosome, something called Down syndrome, and was separated from our family at birth. I’m a geneticist’s daughter. I know that chromosomes, especially that extra one, are important. I want to know where he is, who he is, but he is never more than a whisper, a ghost in the family fiction of happiness and health. Nameless except for the name I give him — Cousin [...]
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