Elsa Sturite was supposed to be on the Titanic. But she wasn’t, so I went to Colorado. You see, Elsa was my great-grandmother. She emigrated from Latvia in search of a better life and found it in Brooklyn, New York, in the early twentieth century with my great-grandfather Carl. (He was an immigrant who sweet-talked his way into the United States, but that’s a whole different story.) She brought her knitting, tatting, and sewing skills along with some tools, and she and Carl married and started their family.
While Carl worked with extended family at an iron mill (and made the kitchen cabinet hardware for their first home), Elsa flourished as a seamstress in the New York City garment industry. The phrase “dab hand with a needle,” I swear, was coined…
