Sometime in the winter of 2010, my dad sat my younger brother and me down for a talk. He was getting older, he said. His side of our family was becoming increasingly distant due to age and sickness and death and divorce, and because there were no women in our family—my mom died when my brother and I were kids, none of my grandparents are alive anymore, and my dad’s two brothers are both divorced with sons—he told us that as we got older there would be no one to wrangle the family together, no one to plan events and...