Why do only famous people have biographies(自传)? This is the question two young sisters, 7-year-old Aishvarya and 11-year-old Vaishali, asked their parents. They were reading biographies in school and realized they knew more about Beyoncé than about their own grandparents. So they decided to do something about it.
They created “Grand Stories”, a workbook that helps grandchildren learn about their grandparents. Through answering a series of guided questions and telling stories, Grand Stories helps families learn more about each other.
This family had come from India to the US, and all four grandparents live very far away. Obviously through modern technology and some family visits, these young girls know their grandparents and love them very much, but they wondered why they didn’t know more about their grandparents, where they grew up and went to school, how they met and married. What were their stories? Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the stories they wanted to know mirror the “Do you know” 20-questions that my colleague, Marshall Duke, and I developed to study how much people know of their family history. So Aishvarya and Vaishali decided not only to find out about their own family, but to help other kids learn about their families as well.
The sisters’ father tells about the visit to India when the girls asked their own grandparents to write their biography. The grandfather, doesn’t usually talk too much, did not share much during the interview either. But then he stayed up all night writing his stories, and when the father looked through the stories, he realized there was so much he’d never known about his own father! Through these stories the father felt closer to his own family.
What these two young sisters have already discovered is how much we depend on knowing our family stories to understand who we are in the world, and what our strengths are. You can see more about Grand Stories at www.grandstories.bigcartel.com. Whether you’re 7 or 70, it’s never too early or too late to start sharing family stories.
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