Old stories and new stories are essential: They tell us who we are, and they enable us to survive. We thank all the ancestors, and we thank all those people who keep on telling stories generation after generation, because if you don’t have the stories, you don’t have anything.

–  Leslie Marmon Silko

You likely know the “20 Questions” guessing game process that revolves around players asking yes/no questions of someone who has selected and keeps in mind a particular person, place, animal, object, or concept that questioners through a process of question turn-taking try to figure out. Popular for passing time in the company of family while travelling or among friends learning a bit more about each other’s lives and interests while just hanging out. This game passes time, and uses questions to discover answers. As an amusing pastime, it’s rich with evoking good feelings but light on creating memorable insights about people in the group.

I have in mind a different set of 20 questions, the Do You Know Survey developed by Marshall Duke, Robin Fivush, and Sara Duke, which cluster into two broad categories – Family Origins and Histories, and Birth and Family Trait stories. Overall, the questions are structured as who, what, when, where, why, and how queries. The first of these – Origins and Histories, for example, focuses on basics such as parents and grandparents growing up, meeting, and marrying; on recollections of good and bad experiences in school, work, life, and health; and on appreciating family members’ national, ethnic, cultural, and/or immigration backgrounds.

Rather than what is told, the key factor is how stories are transmitted—through consistent, undistracted conversations where family members listen and engage over many years. These regular and predictable gatherings create opportunities for children to hear a family’s history, build emotional strength and a sense of identity. The cumulative effect of these interactions fosters resilience and well-being, highlighting the power of family storytelling when it is an ongoing, meaningful presence rather than an isolated moment of information sharing.

I navigated, dare I say enjoyed, my DNA discovery because Pops’ family storytelling and the coffee circles with my aunts sparked curiosity to seek stories to build some knowledge, sone sense of this this third family.

Let me tell you a bit about how I came to realize old and new stories as essential.

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The fingerprint ghosting this black and white photograph suggests to me that Pops made this image while becoming acquainted with his new Polaroid Land Camera, a 1960s version with the bellows and a pop up flash, and loaded with black and white film that sandwiched photo paper and chemical emulsion in a packet that could be pulled apart to reveal fully processed image after a shutter click and a minute’s time. Mom made other images that day in the Tracy backyard, checking out this new camera. Both my parents, gifted with their own cameras during their 1940s teen years, were part of families that valued the joy and history captured in family portraits and snapshots.

Early on, Mom and Pops taught me, the kid in this photo and their only child, to see my worlds through multiple lenses – cameras and words and feelings. The stories that I took in – then and now – are shaped by friends and families, reporters and researchers, music and art, students and strangers, perceptions and dialogues. In writing and sharing autobiographical or pedagogical stories now, I need to – at least imaginally – put my butt back onto the Adirondack chair arm of this photograph to orient my nervous system again to safety.

That’s Grumpy at the left of this photo sitting on the edge of the chair, shirtless behind his bibbed overalls, elbows and forearms resting on thighs so that the balled up right hand fits inside the open left palm. While his mouth shape suggests he had been speaking, his eyes focus somewhere beyond Gram and me on the other half of the two-person, Grumpy-made chair. Most often, he joined conversations briefly and quietly – listening at length, then offering a fleeting sneer or smile, guffaw or sigh; or moving back in his chair as if to punctuate a comment, or forward in preparing to further the telling.

At the right, ah, that’s Gram with a fresh wash and curl from Dot’s down the street, her grey shining as it weaves with yet-black strands. That day’s pastel housedress is smoothed over her knees so she can sprawl her legs, relaxing her entire body into her side of the chair. Always, it’s her face and positioning of both arms that draw viewers into this photograph: Her head is tilted to look directly from her cat-glasses enhanced face onto my own smaller upturned face. Her left arm curls around my back with its hand lightly holding the hem of my shorts. Her right arm completes the circle around me, resting as it does on the tennis-shoe-shod feet I’ve plopped into her lap. Her facial features express quiet attention – she is fully engaged with whatever taIe I am telling.

And me, the 3½-year old wearing that summer’s favourite striped t-shirt and cuffed shorts? My hands and arms mirror Grumpy’s pose. I’ve got my own Gram-like cat eye glasses to let me see things up close. These decades later, I’m drawn to the scrunched-up lips and relaxed jaw line that suggest I felt at ease – completely safe, actually –  in talking with intensity as a granddaughter invited to take her place in this family.

This right section draws most viewers’ attention, having brushed past Grumpy’s seeming disengagement to focus on the more interactive half of the photo. I’m drawn to the wider view that offers a lens onto what I’ve come to learn as necessary components for storytelling: listening to others’ stories, telling one’s own stories, and seeking to understand the positive, negative, and oscillating themes and threads of storytelling across time.

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A handful of years later, in 1967 or 1968, as part of a 5th grade “language arts” unit focused on learning, talking, and writing about our own family histories, I prepared for an upcoming assignment by arraying a selection of family photos and ephemera around a hand painted wedding plate recording my parents’ wedding month and year, December 1956. Having recently celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary, I knew the date and did the math: the span between 28 December to 5 February, my birthday, was and is one month and eight days.

When the time came to share what I was learning about my family with deskmates, I must have disclosed the wedding-birthday data as part of what I’d discovered. I would be among those who would learn a year later in a “human reproduction” unit that normally pregnancy followed marriage, and that babies formed over a nine month period. Turns out some of my classmates had already learned this information, along with learning ways of appraising births that happened outside these parameters. And they had also learned, at home or in church, ways of naming and shaming someone born outside that normally: Illegitimate. Bastard. Two new words for me that day.

I brought that story home. I knew that home was a safe place to make sense of those words. My parents’ response was clear: Those attitudes were illegitimate. Children are never illegitimate.

Our conversation reprized parts of my birth story I already knew: Labor started earlier than expected, which found my Mom calling the doctor’s phone service and her oldest sister, who organized their taxi ride to the hospital. Pops got the 2am phone call from my aunt while at the Tracy homeplace as his overnight stay on his traveling sales route, which is also when Gram and Grumpy learned that there was a pregnancy in addition to the recent marriage. And, as the embellishment Mom loved to tell, everyone fell in love with that dark haired, cross-eyed, yawning, wiggling baby girl named for her maternal grandmother. As a follow up, Mom introduced me to one new story via Gram’s “congratulations on the new baby card,” asking me to read the opening line aloud: “Well, speak of surprises, this was a lovely one.”

That night I heard about how the people who loved us told stories of their marriage and my birth with joy and celebration rather than shame. The positive emotional tone of that night’s stories, I know now, played a significant role in deepening my senses of self and family. Jane Ogden and Amy Snyder call this tone a positive valence, saying: “[H]ow the stories are told rather than the content of the stories per se has a greater influence on the process of intergenerational transmission between parent and child” (12).

It also matters, according to Duke and Fivush, the overall pattern that emerges from the shared stories. Based on recordings of family conversations, observations, and interviews, the research duo describes three narrative types: Ascending narratives focus on upward progress, meeting challenges, and creating new opportunities. Descending narratives focus instead on lost opportunities, social and personal stumbles, detrimental impacts of political and historical events, while also recounting re-grouping efforts. And oscillating narratives that weave the ups and downs together for a narrative that conveys variations in family life across persons and times. The complexity inherent to oscillating narratives prompts children to notice alternatives and possibilities, and fosters sense-making reflection for adolescents at a stage for developing a resilient autobiographical self who is an autonomous yet connected being.

In telling and retelling my birth story, my parents helped me weave an oscillating origins story.

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Given what I recall hearing, it’s likely not surprising that I put safety above honesty in completing the family history unit’s main assignment – to write a short family history, or a biography drawn from interviews with a family member. The report I wrote focused on 1960s pop star Davy Jones. It felt safer for me to claim that I misunderstood the assignment, and let my year 5 teacher, Mrs. Hoagland, take up the “you’re not living up to your potential” script that wrapped around me from second to sixth grade for asking too many questions, talking to my classmates too much, and talking back when I disagreed with a teacher’s classroom rules.

And yet, I could have written the assignment narrative simply by calling up the Origins and Histories stories from paternal homeplace gatherings and maternal family reunions and coffees with my aunts. I knew the stories and lineages of my grandmothers Hannah and Ida as well as their grandmothers Hannah and Ida. I was named for two maternal Idas via my initials. My brain was shaped by two paternal Hannahs I came to know through life-shaping stories shared at family tables, and carried forward through journals and photographs.

At that Tracy kitchen table, I shared with Gram the what of my classmates’ comments and my assignment avoidance. I expected to hear and talk through Gram’s recurring “What are you going to do about that?” query. I didn’t expect that she would, instead, tell me her own birth story including details making clear that her 13 May 1905 birthday fell just six months after her own parents’ marriage on 6 November 1904. With just a few words spoken in a positive tone, Gram aligned her life with mine. She told her story with confidence and in confidence: with confidence in her character, and in confidence that I would honor the boundary of sharing this private story only within the family.

The telling and the boundary created, according to “Family Stories and Family Secrets,” a whole-family secret, one “known by the entire family but never shared with outsiders” (Vangelisti in Fivush, et al, 23). The grown ups in my family had already done the math linked to Gram’s birth, and likely to the timing of her own marriage relative to the birth of her first son five months and three days later, a calculation I wouldn’t perform for decades.

During my teenage years, Mom shared other premarital pregnancy family stories, all passed on during her own growing up: Her maternal grandparents became parents three months after their marriage. The older sister who opted to raise her first born son on her own, and to be open about this as she married and had more children. A second sister who accepted an invitation from her oldest sister, the nurse, to live in her bigger city apartment near the maternity home that would place her child for adoption, and later accepted a husband’s command that she not tell their children about their sibling.

As I review Mom’s family stories from my newish Not Parent Expected perspective, I recognize two things: that each of the women in my family created her own way of navigating a premarital pregnancy, and that I was expected to keep intrafamily secrets. In contrast to whole-family secrets that “can actually bond family members together and create intimacy, in the sense of belonging to an in-group,” intrafamily secrets limit that who is allowed to know will more often foster a sense of insecurity and betrayal both when the secrets remain in the background or come to the fore (Vangelisti in Fivush, et al, 23). As with secrets generally, the combination of cultural and family contexts work to shape and coerce choices women make about identity, sexuality, and paternity secret keeping.

In bringing me into the intrafamily secrets, I suspect Mom was preparing me to understand why she opted for protecting her own paternity secret – choosing to hide culturally-expected shame about not knowing paternity even more than the fact of premarital pregnancy, and offering me a story collection for an “if and when” day of learning that I had both a genetic biodude who spawned a zygote and a social father who shaped a life.

In weaving me into the Alexander-Evans-Stafford-Svelstad telling of oscillating stories, Mom gave me access to the generation upon generation stories of ups and downs, of figuring life out or not, of whole-family secrets, of perceiving the how and why of ancestors’ decisions in small or huge historical and personal moments, of family encompassing friends and shirttail relatives, and of acknowledging damages wrought by family bullies and egotists as part of building ways forward.

Because of those oscillating stories from families, I trust myself to journey reflectively with newly gained paternal family knowledge thanks to a paternal cousin who offered a timeline of photographs, and graciously answered my twenty-some questions about the persons who would be my grandmother and aunt. Her thoughtful, frank responses about how she’d observed or learned within family about biodude’s actions and attitudes align with one brief comment Mom shared in our last conversation, before making a promise to say more when I came home for her birthday a few weeks to follow: The man I was seeing before your dad didn’t share my values. You would say he was sexist, racist, and homophobic. He also wasn’t kind like your father, so I chose to be in a relationship with your dad.”

I also trust that I bring compassion on this journey to unravel that more complex birth story as I learn from my godmother about my parents’ emotional challenges in navigating the ups and downs of a marriage, two work lives, and raising the deeply curious, contemplative and talkative daughter who was the heart of their secret. And maybe, just maybe, the energy surrounding that complex secret seeded my own life’s work of seeking, thinking, writing, and teaching to understand and create a world built in response to people repudiating “othering.” Maybe that has started my digging into digitized newspapers, social media, and various public history archives for artifacts that help me to personify rather than other biodude, his parents, sister, and marital children, and to understand his historical genealogical lineage. I hope that my curious heart will bring me to dance with the biodude skeletons that I’ll be finding along the way. That seems the way to make more stories, even if they’re just in my head.

The 11th Doctor to young Amelia Pond: 

I’ll be a story in your head.
But that’s OK: we’re all stories, in the end.
Just make it a good one, eh?

The Big Bang, Series 5, Episode 13 (2010)