Your parents’ first date. Your grandfather’s tile business. Your dad’s story of the Egyptian man who offered to buy your stepmother for 10,000 camels. The weekends your aunts and uncles spent down the Shore as kids at the Latin Casino. Your great-aunt’s stories of slumming it at prohibition-era speakeasies in New York. Your mother’s clothing label and her first big order from Neiman-Marcus. Your great-grandmother’s journey from Kiev to Ellis Island–which turned out years later to be Philly, but Ellis Island sounds way better in the story.

What number of your family stories are lost relative to the ones that are not? How many of those details are somewhere you can access them at a later date, open them up, and create new memories and understanding about where you and your children have come from? Continue reading →