Ask Questions Before History is Lost

Only by discovering an extensive history in his grandfather’s basement did Jordan Salama learn of his family’s extraordinary journey. Jordan read of his great grandfather’s family leaving the Syrian desert for Argentina’s mountains at the turn of the century, his grandfather’s youth in the working-class neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, and their eventual trip across the Americas to the United States.

In the December 2024 issue of National Geographic, Jordan describes his family’s “Historia Antigua.” His grandfather, Moisés Salama, had summarized centuries of oral history, touching Mesopotamia, medieval Spain, Ottoman Syria, and the Americas. But the Historia Antigua had only the what, where, and when of his family’s story. Jordan sought to add color and nuance to these histories by asking the why and the how. “Why did my Jewish great-grandparents leave Damascus in such a hurry? Why did my great grandfather decide to work as a traveling salesman with a horsedrawn cart in the remote Andes?” 

When sharing these conversations with friends, many lamented that “they hadn’t done the same or didn’t think to until it was too late.” Jordan concluded that “time and inertia remain our biggest barriers to hearing our own stories.”

Many obituaries I read make the mistake of focusing on the who, where, and when. Maybe no one took the time to ask the why and how questions. While you still can, ask questions of your elders and those who knew them back in the day. Here are some tips from Jordan.

• Ask about otherwise ordinary objects around the house that could contain clues about the past.
• Record and transcribe kitchen-table conversations.
• If those conversations aren’t happening naturally, organize talk-show-style interviews with the rest of the family as the audience.
• If you are of an older generation, it is your turn to speak. Think about how you can make these stories come alive.

“Family stories are the identities we create in worlds foreign and familiar, remembered now but forever at risk of being forgotten.”