What's In the Bone: The Deep History of a Domino Set

It all started, for me, while babysitting my ten-year-old granddaughter. We were thinking about playing a new game, and I recalled an old set of dominoes I had stashed away in the basement. We began to play, and I began to ponder.I knew the set had been owned by my father, kept in the basement of the house I inherited, along with all its contents, upon his death. He and I had never played dominoes together. I suspect the set had remained, if not untouched, unplayed for decades.Who may have possessed the set before it was my father’s is, itself, an inference rather than a fact. My father was born in 1920, and would not, in any meaningful sense, have “owned” anything as a child — so if the set predates him, as I believe it does, it must have belonged first to his father, my grandfather, Frederick Choppin. This is an assumption, not a documented certainty. It rests on timing, and on something harder to defend: the set simply feels like the kind of thing my grandfather would have owned,…