Among the satisfactions of writing Washington Post obituaries, basically biographies in miniature, is the opportunity to explore how people take the hand they've been dealt -- fate, family circumstance, luck, place, etc. -- and craft a life for themselves. That, plus the license to be curious -- nosy, if you will -- means that hardly a day goes by that I don't discover some fact, some tidbit of information about the past that I didn't know existed.

Here's an example. Writing the obituary for Cissy Karro, I came across the story of the Bannockburn Cooperative, a group of homeowners, mostly Jewish, who formed a housing cooperative in Bethesda in the late 1940s. Mrs. Karro and her husband were charter members.