Happy 150th to Andrew

Happy 150th birthday (yesterday) to my great-grandfather Andrew. He was born in Poland 99 years before I was born and died here in the US 20 years before I came into the world. He seems like he would have been an interesting guy to know. Look at that picture! Interestingly, that shot was taken on the farm he purchased from the family of Robert Purvis, an active member of the Abolitionist movement in Philadelphia and the only African-American to lead a major abolitionist organization. He was a key figure in the Underground Railroad (along with William Still), president of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery society, and at the end of the Civil War, President Lincoln was going to have Purvis head up the Freedmen’s Bureau (though Purvis had to leave the post when President Johnson gutted the Bureau during Reconstruction). In the barn, one of my great-uncles found a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Many years later, was reading about an upcoming exhibition in Philadelphia at the Afro-American…