Your family stories are more than memories. They can be instructions for how to live, Axios' Natalie Daher writes.

• Why it matters: Stories from parents, grandparents and other older people can help us understand where we came from — and how to handle what comes next.

🕰️ Case in point: Axios Finish Line reader John Jarchow of Brookings, Ore., started writing down family stories in a process he says has been therapeutic and has no end in sight.

• His late parents had Alzheimer's. His brother is now in memory care. At 76, Jarchow told Axios, "There's no one else who knows the stories."
• What started as a few memories grew into a 100-plus-page record he plans to self-publish to share with his nieces and nephews, and future generations.
• Along the way, he realized the project could do more than preserve the past — "There is a chance to influence the future."

📝 Between the lines: Family stories serve different purposes at different stages of life, says Emory psychologist Robyn Fivush, who studies autobiographical memory.

• Shared stories reinforce family bonds and history.
• Intergenerational stories — "let me tell you about when I was a little girl" — can help younger people understand who they are and what their family values are.
• For older adults, storytelling can become a kind of life review: What did my life mean? What am I leaving behind?

The intrigue: The most useful stories may not be the happiest ones.

• Fivush says hearing about an older relative's setbacks can give younger people a more realistic model of life.
• If a child only hears that a grandparent "lived a charmed life," she said, their own struggles can feel like evidence something is wrong with them.

📱 The tech angle: New tools aim to make it easier to preserve those stories without losing the relative's voice.

• Charlie Greene, founder of family-storytelling platform Remento, told Axios the company uses AI to suggest prompts, ask follow-up questions and turn recorded conversations into written stories.

But tech isn't enough. Remento has found that storytellers are more likely to keep recording when relatives respond to their stories, giving them an audience and showing that their stories matter.

• His advice — get specific. Instead of "Tell me about your wedding," ask what went wrong or what surprised you.
• Greene also recommends pulling out old photos and asking what was happening when they were taken.

🌳 Zoom out: Susan Bluck, a psychology professor at the University of Florida, says intergenerational storytelling can serve as a way to pass along lessons and values that might help the next generation live "a good life."

• You don't have to be related. In Bluck's Life Story Lab, students on the research team were trained to analyze about 200 life-story interviews with older adults who had serious or terminal cancer.
• One student told Bluck the stories helped lessen her sense that she needed to know exactly how her own life would unfold. There were "so many ways to live a life," she realized.

🧭 The bottom line: Older people have already lived through experiences younger people haven't, including loss, relationship changes, career upheaval. Their stories can be an untapped resource.

💡 Try these adapted prompts:

• When in your life did you feel most alive?
• What experience changed the way you see yourself or the world?
• What's a hard thing you went through — and what did it teach you?
• What are you most proud of, and why did it matter to you?
• What have you learned about life that you'd want to pass on to someone younger?

💌 Your turn: What family story has stayed with you? Write to us at [email protected] with a couple of lines about a story from an older person that helped you through something in your own life. We may feature it in a future edition.

Axios' own Laine Hern sent us this shot of the Aquinnah Cliffs on Martha's Vineyard from her recent trip.