The Importance of Family Storytelling

 The Importance of Family Storytelling

Author’s Note: In mid-October, my Good Aunt passed away after a rather long and debilitating struggle at the venerable age of 91. I am devastated by her loss. She lived an amazing, adventurous, and fearless life, galavanting all over the world, from the Holy Land, where she swam in the Dead Sea, to Antarctica, and beyond. She was a writer, a family historian, a singer, a seamstress, an actor, a poet, a cook, and a baker. To me, she was the one person on the Bare side of my family with whom I felt a real connection, not just as an aunt and nephew, but as someone with whom I had a great deal in common. She was a kindred spirit and someone who seemed to understand the specific challenges I had, feeling like the black sheep for most of my life.

Over the years, we racked up quite a pile of correspondence, in letters and cards, emails, texts, and the occasional calls. She often reviewed and critiqued my short stories or challenged me to finally write a “whole damn novel”. She helped me to understand and appreciate our family’s history, filling in details and sharing with me points of connection with our ancestors that I wouldn’t otherwise have had. When I wrote a poem about building a fire using traditional skills with our middle son, she basically ordered me to share it with any poetry periodical I could, which I did, to no avail, but I’m not disappointed that I tried. 

More than anything, though, she cemented in me the importance of telling stories. Not just the scary fictional ones, but the important tales of one’s family, especially to the newer generations. So it is that I dedicate this essay to my Aunt Jayne, who was a friend and a support and a heroine of mine, and whose memory I will carry with me and whose story I will share.

My maternal grandfather was something of a hero. Over the years of my development from a child to a young adult, I heard many tales from many different people about him. Combined with pictures that I have from the family albums, this oral compendium of stories and visuals helped me to create a solid human from the memories of others. I can think of him and refer to him and even share tales about him, having never met the man myself. This is the power and the importance of storytelling.

Daniel D. Swavely Sr. died in 1965 at age 55 from an aneurysm that was a complication of an earlier incident. While riding a horse, the animal reared and slipped and fell back on him, badly injuring his genitals, breaking ribs, and his arm. Several months later, complaining of a headache, he slipped into unconsciousness, and two days after that, he died. My brother was one year old; I wouldn’t come around for another decade or so. My mother was twenty-six years old.

Everything that I know about Grandpop Swavely comes from oral history shared with me by my mother, grandmother, Uncle Dan, and Pop Bare. Their tales wove together to form a thin, but still tangible specter of the man I would never meet. From an early age, I was very interested in learning about him, so I asked questions about him and internalized everything. Other times, though, I was given breadcrumbs about him through regular family interactions. While upset with me about something, my mother would say, “My father would never have put up with this.” All of it came together in a way that made me understand that, even though I had never met him, I still understood him and knew him as well as I could.

My mother, Uncle Dan, and my Nana are all gone now. The only people who remember him are my brother, Pop Bare, and me. When I see his picture in our living room, I am grateful for the opportunity to be his grandson despite never knowing him. His life, his genetics, and his name all form part of who I am. With the tales told about him, I feel very fortunate that my family took sharing details about his life so seriously. It was a gift of incredible proportions.

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When my father-in-law died, we were crushed. Especially, though, I felt a pang for our young sons. They were very much closer to him, both in nature and in looks, than they understood, but Micki worked hard to make sure that she told stories to them about their grandfather and always pointed out when they were behaving like he did. One of the tropes in our family is to call the boys “Gary” when they act like he would have in a similar situation. I knew him for less than a decade, but we were close, and I was so grateful for his role in all of our lives. I’m glad the boys knew him. They were young when he passed, so it was important to make sure they understood the man their grandfather was in life.

Similarly, almost by habit, I tell them about Pop Bare, with whom they spent less time, sadly, but who is no less important in understanding me. Though they do not share genetic bonds with me or the Bare family, the people who formed the foundation of my life are just as important to them in understanding me and my “side” of the family. 

Sharing tales can provide context, but it also broadens and deepens our connections. The boys never met my mother, but they knew Uncle Dan. Stories we’ve told and experiences they’ve shared with us have given them a perspective about the people who came before. Someday, I’ll be gone, and they will wonder, as I often have, about my family history or their mother’s ancestors, and because we have always been intentional about sharing important stories and details, I think they won’t lack much in piecing together the people that defined us.

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Sadly, I think that family storytelling is a habit of the previous generations that hasn’t transferred to the modern moment. I hope I’m wrong about this. Genealogical help is far more available and, in many cases, as in our library, free these days. This means that anyone can come to the library and start the process of finding out about their history. Like many of our online resources, though, just because they’re freely available doesn’t mean that people understand or even want to make use of them. In fact, one of our challenges has always been getting the public to understand that we offer more than just books.

I couldn’t imagine not knowing about my family, but I suspect that for some, sharing family history is not a priority. My family’s maternal and paternal sides are natural storytellers, and there is a historical bent on both sides. My father’s uncle and my good aunt did a lot of work to compile the family histories, too, so I had a lot to work with. It was worrying to think that there are families out there that have not been sharing stories, or that there are young people who just aren’t interested in knowing. 

I have to acknowledge that part of this is that some people don’t really care about history and genealogy. I’m not trying to sound old, but the social platforms provide a lot of distractions that are hard to ignore. It may not be something that interests them. I thought every family had at least one person who had to collect and save family histories, but I may be wrong. My experience might not be universal.

I spent many evenings at both grandmothers’ tables, eating homemade pies and drinking milked-down coffee, listening to my family regale one another with tales of people from all the way back. Legends that they both told me, or that my parents and their siblings shared, formed not only the basis of the family history I hold dear but also gave me a sense of where I fit in the whole skein. 

Recently, while speaking to my eldest cousin, I was momentarily caught by how much time had gone by since we’d seen each other. I’m the youngest of the grandchildren, so he’s twenty years my senior. He quipped in response to my astonishment, “I know how old you are. I was there when you were born.” That tiny bit of history filled me with a particularly Bare sense of connection, because it gave me one more thread to weave into the tapestry, sharing context and reinforcing that I’m actually a member of my family.

I have always struggled a bit with that feeling of belonging and connection. I’m not adopted or estranged from my family, per se, but I did spend a good portion of my adolescence feeling as though the people to whom I belonged didn’t see me as family. In fact, for most of my life, because of my age and the distance I lived from my cousins, especially, I always felt alienated. When they would visit Pennsylvania, or when, on the rare times we visited them, I absolutely relished the sense of connection that I felt. These are people who had the same grandparents as me after all. They had 50 percent of my heritage. Pop Bare’s sisters are older, so their kids are all older, but even so, these were the people with whom I shared family resemblance, facial features, body shapes, gestures, and ways of thinking and seeing the world that were not odd or weird, but quite common in our lineage.

Like the pictures of my late maternal grandfather, these similarities helped me to build a sense of belonging and connection that are so important to me. They wouldn’t exist without the stories that we tell one another about our family, our heritage, and the way we fit into those tales. 

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Part of the reason that I write these essays for DRO is so that there is a record, not just of what I think, but also of stories that I have told about my experiences, my family, my heritage, and my ancestors. Although we can’t sit around the table with my grandparents anymore, and most of us live many hours away, our connection with one another may be strained by distance and life, but at least it isn’t nonexistent. We have context. We have a connection. We have a sense of shared history, and we understand the tapestry of our family’s stories.

Someday, this page will go dark. Maybe I will have stopped writing, or will no longer be able to put two coherent thoughts together. For my kids and theirs, I want there to be a place where they can go to read what I thought and learn about who I was. Along with the many pictures of me that they may wish to look at, it may help them build a picture in their mind of who I was, the things that mattered to me, the topics that interested me, my strengths and weaknesses. And maybe, as I have done, they will tell stories about me, referencing tales that they heard told about me by Micki or the boys, or our many nieces and nephews, that help to make me real for them in the same way.

As I wrote this essay, though, it occurred to me that the most important way that most people learn is through behavior modeled in the home. Ironically, this works with positive and negative behavior. There is something to be said for starting new traditions. A few years ago, a “family-oriented” ad campaign challenged busy families to take time to sit at dinner and talk. Although this seemed somewhat hokey at the time, it nevertheless proved something that I also learned in my youth: unless we take the time to talk with our kids and tell them the family tales, then there is no way they can either develop a love for them or understand the importance of them.

In a few weeks (as I write this), we are looking forward to family coming for the Thanksgiving Holiday. It will be a perfect time to not only share some family stories, but also, with a new generation, introduce them to the family in a way that I hope will fill them with a sense of belonging and position and interest to know more about our vast, ever-changing family.