Thoughts on Family History

With everyone else out of the house today, I cleaned some and then listened to a podcast of an interview with Maxine Hong Kingston as she confronts aging in her book I Love A Broad Margin To My Life. She's a remarkable person to listen to. Kingston took the title of her book from the quote by Henry David Thoreau.  Her view of being an elder and living against the backdrop of mortality is fastening.  Listening to her causes me to think about genealogy (even though I've had it on my mind) in a different sort of way. Not just from a personal interest but in the context of a responsibility to collect and pass that information to those in the family younger then yourself.  Creating a history of heritage is an elder's responsibility and it seems to me that it is more than simply collecting a genealogy history, but seeing where we've come from so often helps define who we are.

It really seems quite natural to me that poets would feel such a responsibility quite natural in the same way we do story telling. What do you think?