Here's an interesting link about memory: University of New Hampshire researchers discovered that the older adults they interviewed about their life stories invariably discussed their major life transitions.

I recently finished a small, lighthearted book of reminiscences from my early childhood in the late 1960s, as a gift for my daughter. Even though the book didn’t address any serious matters whatsoever (those I’ll save for another book), I did find myself wondering, as I wrote, what my father would think about my version of events.

As personal historians, Tom and I mostly focus on helping people tell the stories of their own lives. But what if your chosen project is to tell not your own story, but that of an ancestor? Ancestral stories present a different kind of challenge than writing our personal stories—in personal histories, we often have too much information and the challenge becomes knowing what to leave out. In an ancestral history we usually don’t have enough information. Our challenge then becomes to construct an interesting narrative around dubious, sketchy, or even non-existent life details.