Mitzi Perdue

Your Family’s Greatest Heirloom

“There’s nothing greater you can give your family than this,” says Jamie Yuenger, founder of StoryKeep. “Provide those who come after you with the tools for personal, emotional, and spiritual success.”

 The way to do this, she believes, is through framing the family story and then communicating it. 

Yuenger founded her company StoryKeep eight years ago, and her quest is to help families find and shape their stories. This means pinpointing their deepest values and combining these with all the wisdom they’ve accumulated throughout their lifetimes.

The Software that Guides Our Lives

The importance of all this lies in the following fact: We are the stories we tell ourselves. Our attitudes and the stories that form these attitudes are like the software that guides our lives.

In her view, we have choices in how we frame our life’s experiences. For example, we can go to a psychiatrist and focus on everything that’s gone wrong. 

But alternatively, we can search out not only what went wrong, but we can focus on what we learned from these tribulations. We can celebrate the resilience that got us through the bad times.

We can also celebrate–and this is important–what’s gone right. We can focus on what we’ve learned from the triumphs in our lives. 

“People find the experience of looking at their whole lives is powerful, revelatory, and cathartic. It means seeing patterns, and it enables them to connect the dots in surprising and genuinely uplifting ways.”

It doesn’t end there. “People get to see what they were able to offer during their time on this planet. And for recipients of this information, it helps them see their own lives in context. It helps let them know where they came from and how they can have purpose and impact.” 

How It Works

For Yuenger, a common approach for a family could be to end up with an hour-long video which was edited down from 20 hours of taped interviews. The video could include family photographs and home movies.

The end product might also include publicly available archival movies. The archival material could be news clips from what was going on in the world when an important event was occurring in the indivual’s life.

Cataloguing the Love Letters that Started a Family

But there are dozens of other approaches a family might want to take in preserving its memories. One family she worked with had an extraordinary collection of love letters spanning three years at the height of World War II.

 “During that period in our nation’s history,” Yuenger points out, “It was common for soldiers who didn’t have a boyfriend or girlfriend to be put in touch with a ‘penpal,” that is, someone who wanted to write to a soldier.”

“The family’s collection of letters shows that two people who hadn’t known each other gradually fell in love during their penal correspondence. The letters even reveal the soldier actually proposing by mail. When he returned from the war, the couple found that in real life they were still in love and they soon married.”

The couple had four children, and it’s these children who hired StoryKeep to delve into an old box that contained the three years’ worth of love letters. Jeunger digitized the letters, organized them, and created a beautiful coffee table-size book.

The letters were the family’s most precious documents. Because of the new book, the family no longer has to worry that the letters could get lost or damaged. Best of all, this sacred part of the family history is easily accessible, both now and in the future, to all the family members. 

Drawing on her own experience, Yuenger has a small piece of advice for you: the best time to start this kind of project is now. “It breaks my heart,” she says, “when families who are considering recording their histories delay and then suddenly, it’s too late.”

If you’d like to secure your family’s memories, Jamie Yuenger would like to hear from you. Contact her at: 347-762-6575 and jamie@storykeep.com.

For samples of her work, visit www.storykeep.com