26/10/2025
You might think you already know your family’s stories pretty well, Elizabeth Keating wrote in 2022. But do you really know as much as you think? https://theatln.tc/wDvF4Mat
As an anthropology professor, Keating has always been fascinated by the stories that families tell, and a few years ago, she started researching the tales that are passed down from generation to generation. “Our elders may share some familiar anecdotes over and over again, but still, many of us have no broader sense of the world they lived in, and especially what it was like before we came along. The people I interviewed knew so little about their grandparents’ or parents’ early lives, such as how they were raised and what they experienced as young people,” Keating explained. “Few could remember any personal stories about when their grandparents or parents were children. Whole ways of life were passing away unknown. A kind of genealogical amnesia was eating holes in these family histories as permanently as moths eat holes in the sweaters lovingly knitted by our ancestors.”
As Keating interviewed more people, she developed a set of questions designed to get a person talking about the past in a way they never had before. Some of the questions are basic background information, such as where someone was born, but some are more abstract inquiries, such as how someone conceives of their identity, what they believe in, and what they’ve noticed about the passage of time. Specificity is key, so after asking a relative about the home they grew up in, follow up with requests for details: What did their windows look out onto? What did they hear when they woke up in the morning? When you ask for descriptions of an elder’s childhood home and the neighborhoods they roamed around, you’ll hear stories that place you in a rich sensory world you’ve known little about. So ask what family dinners were like and what your relatives were taught about expressing emotion. Ask about their worst first dates and where they bought their clothes. And remember that the most important questions can also be the plainest. One of Keating’s favorites is just “What do you wish people knew about you?”
