How proud people are of their mother’s or grandmother’s or great-aunt’s service; how eager they were to tell their siblings, their children, to impress upon the family the import of what this foremother did. Phil Cagney wrote that his daughter, Erin, a grad student at American University, had walked by the former Naval Communications Annex (now the Department of Homeland Security) every day, without realizing that her grandmother, Mary V. Lauer Cagney, had run the bombe machines that broke the German Enigma cipher from that very place. “She’s literally walking in her grandmother’s footsteps,”
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