The keeper of stories has often been a woman.
I didn’t realize how much that mattered until I moved my aunt across the country in a U-Haul. She is the last living sibling on my mother’s side. Like so many women before her, she carries the family’s stories.
I learned that my great-uncle Karl helped lay the original runways at Stapleton Airport, work that later damaged his lungs from cement dust. He also owned one of Denver’s first laundromats. “The women were so happy,” my aunt said. “It was a wonderful place to do laundry.”
I smiled to myself, wondering if anyone has ever truly been happy doing laundry.
I’m grateful for the time I spent listening. When my aunt is gone, many of those stories will disappear with her. Some now live with me, but I haven’t done much to pass them on. Soon I’ll belong to the last generation that heard them firsthand, and that realization feels weightier than I expected.
My children and grandchildren are busy building lives of their own. Stories about great-grandparents may not seem important today, yet we’ve lost something by letting the oral tradition fade. I’ve contributed to that loss.
Even if I share the stories, I wonder what bias I carry from those who first told them. How have my own experiences colored them? Which views from another generation now feel foreign?
Passing stories along imperfectly
Still, some stories are worth telling, even if they’re remembered imperfectly. Perhaps my son, a computer engineer, would enjoy knowing his great-uncle was among the first computer programmers at Texas A&M.
My aunt married my uncle during her senior year of high school while he was serving in Korea. She became the first girl in her school to graduate with both her maiden and married names on her diploma.
My grandpa was known for holding a hammer in one hand and a Bible in the other, building churches both literally and spiritually.
As storytellers, we decide what is remembered and what quietly slips away. I want to honor my ancestors not because they were famous, but because their ordinary lives shaped mine. Their resilience, ingenuity, sacrifice, faith, and humor still echo through our family today.
I can’t preserve every detail, and I won’t tell every story perfectly. But perhaps that’s never been the storyteller’s job. Mine is simply to accept the mantle and pass along what I remember, trusting that those who come after me will do the same.