Black History Month? Turns out it’s My History Month too. Today I learned that my family and I owe a debt of gratitude to Jan Ernst Matzeliger, the African-American inventor of the Automatic Shoe Lasting Machine.

Quoting from an old publication by Compton College that I happened to see today: “His machine created new jobs, shoe prices were cut and wages doubled… Thousands of Europeans left their European poverty to come and work in the prosperous industry created by this Black innovator in Lynn, Massachusetts.”

Quoting from my grandfather Irving Kalikow’s autobiography: “My father, Barnet Kalikow… emigrated from the Russian town of Vlinska Gubernya, around the year 1903… [A] close relative had come here a year or two earlier, to Lynn, Massachusetts, and had reported that jobs were plentiful… So directly from Ellis Island, my father went by train to Lynn, where Uncle Newberg found him a Jewish boarding house (customary) and helped him get a job. At that time, Lynn was the center of the shoe manufacturing industry.”

Later, my great-grandfather Barnet would go into the shoe business for himself with my great-grandmother Ethel — of whom I have hazy childhood memories, because all this is not so very long ago. My grandfather worked in the business before getting into M.I.T. and launching the successful engineering career that opened entirely new paths for my father’s life and, in time, for mine.

In other words: I am here in the U.S., and my family climbed out of poverty and into the middle class here in the U.S., thanks to a device invented by an African-Dutch-Surinamese immigrant to this country whose mother was an enslaved African.

Tl;dr Black history is American history, and it’s my lost history too.