The Value of Family Stories

October is Family History Month, a month dedicated by Congress to the idea that preserving and sharing our family histories is important. Indeed, increasing numbers of families have begun researching their genealogies, trying to fill out family trees with great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents – who they were, and when and where they lived. Searches for old letters and diaries, and possibly even the existence of photos or other kinds of mementos, are avidly undertaken, and new pieces of discovered data are celebrated. Why this intense interest in the past? And how might family history help us create more meaningful experiences within our current families? Perhaps it is not the facts alone that are so important; rather, it may be the stories.

As director of the Family Narratives Lab, I have been studying family stories for three decades and one critical finding always emerges: Families that tell and share more stories have adolescents and young adults who do better on a host of measures: They have higher self-esteem, higher sense of mastery in the world, lower anxiety, and a higher sense of meaning and purpose. Twenty years ago, an excerpt from Bruce Feiler’s book, The Secret of Happy Families, was published in the New York Times. It discussed research that my colleague, Marshall Duke, and I were doing on family storytelling, and concluded that “If you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family’s positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.”

Family stories are more complex than you might imagine. They certainly include family history, stories of our forefathers and foremothers, about whom we may only have a few bits and pieces of information. But most family stories communicate the experiences of people we know: our parents and grandparents when they were growing up and forming young families. These are stories passed down from a living person, someone telling their own experience, perhaps aided with photos or artifacts — but in a very real sense, they are living history. These are sometimes fully-formed stories, well-known and told over and over, or sometimes they are just small peeks at lives lived. And then there are stories shared within the family, reminiscing about the trip to the beach last summer, or a fun outing to an amusement park.

Family stories are rarely purely one type or the other but intermingled in everyday conversation. A family that starts talking about a beach vacation they took together may lead into the mother telling a bit of a story about a beach vacation with her own parents when she was a child, leading into a story about the whole family going to the beach for a big reunion the previous summer. Family stories shared, told and listened to, are part of the tapestry of family conversation, and communicate much more than just what happened. Family stories describe people, who they are and what they are like, and how characteristics are echoed through the family (“You are so much like your grandmother, always enjoying a good practical joke”), as well as values, ideals, hopes and dreams (“And that was always so important to you grandfather, that he was able to provide an education for his children”). This is why we crave family stories: They help define who we are and who we strive to be.

Family stories do not have to be momentous tales. Sometimes they are fully complete, as in the family story that is told every holiday dinner in great detail and with much enjoyment. But most family stores are told in small moments: a few sentences shared during cooking together, or in the car, or seeing something resonant on TV. Families often do not realize that they are telling stories all the time, small references to past experiences shared together or passed from parent to child — or child to parent; family stories are passed both down and up through the generations. These small moments create emotional bonds that anchor us to each other and to our larger families. They provide the backdrop of understanding who we are by providing the stories of where we came from.

Take the time during Family History Month to research your family history and share the details you learn. But also take the time to savor small moments in everyday conversation with your family. Family stories come from family storytelling. Create the stories that will provide your family history for future generations.