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One day when I was about 12 years old, my Uncle Bob came to the house with a leather-bound, yellowed passport. While he talked excitedly about how his Aunt Lucille probably didn’t realize the value of this when she sent it to him, I paged through it slowly, along with a sheet of paper which translated the words from Hungarian. The passport, issued in 1905, recorded my great-grandparents, Jozsef and Julianna Gerencser and their two sons immigrating to Buffalo, New York from a small village in central Hungary.

This was the first time I heard that my grandfather had changed his name from Istvan Gerencser to Stephen Granger. The first time I understood from my mother and uncle that their dad, Stephen, had denied his Hungarian heritage his whole life.

Being twelve years old, I was much more fascinated at the time with the fact that the passport described my ancestors as having “regular” noses. But over many years, as my Uncle Bob continued with his research – a slow process in the 1970s! – I started to ask more questions when he arrived with new stories about the people in my Granger-Gerencser family. Like Christmas in Buffalo, where Stephen and his brother would receive – in “a good year” – an orange and a nickel. How Stephen’s sister, Julie, nearly froze when being taken to church for her baptism in a traditional, but flimsy, dress during a frigid Buffalo winter. Uncle Bob also had plenty of tales about growing up with my mom St. Catharines, Ontario: the piano that fell through the floor at Mr. Zabut’s; my mother wearing her mouse costume on backwards during a skating program. And the story that began one day with his question to my mother, “So, Sis, what is the word for people whose parents were never legally married?”

It was the stories that hooked me. When my mother passed away, I decided I wanted to record what I’d come to think of as “the Uncle Bob stories.” So I arranged to meet him in St. Catharines, in the neighbourhood where he and my mother grew up. We walked the neighbourhood; he talked and I recorded. This afternoon of reminiscing became the genesis of my book, “Strength Within: The Granger Chronicles,” published in 2005 to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of the Gerencser immigration.

By the time I wrote that book I had learned to ask much more often, the question, “why?” Why did they immigrate? Why did they “skip town” to get married? Why did he deny his heritage? This question, of course, leads to the stories. But it also led me to much more. I learned about historical events and their direct impact on my family members. I learned how to counsel other family historians about what the options might be to dealing compassionately with family secrets. I learned how to take genealogical data and turn it into stories that people might read and enjoy.

I got started in genealogy thanks to my Uncle Bob, one of the best storytellers I know. I stay in the game because I’ve discovered I love to tell stories too. For me, genealogy is not about building a huge database of records, but about reaching beyond those records and turning data into story.

How about you? Who are the storytellers in your family? Can you think of ways to tap into those stories before they are lost?