From & To Sathish #7 - Page 84

*"Right Tools of Life"*

_The kitchen Tap was Leaking again. With a sigh, I called a Plumber._

_A few minutes later, a Middle-Aged man walked in — calm, steady, carrying a Faded Toolkit._

_I watched him at work. He pulled out a wrench - it was Cracked at the Handle._

_“How will he fFix anything with that?” I wondered silently._

_He didn’t seem bothered. With a quiet focus, he began loosening the Pipe. A Rusted Portion needed to be Cut off. He Reached into his Bag again and Pulled out a Small Saw - Half of it was Missing!_

_Now I was Sure. I’ve called the Wrong man for the Job. But within Ten Minutes, the Leak was Gone. The tap was Shining, and Not a Single Drop Escaped._

_When I handed him a Hundred-Rupee note, he shook his head. “No, Sir. Half of this is Enough.”_

_I stared at him, Surprised. “Who Refuses Extra Money these Days?”_

_He smiled - a Calm, Grounded Smile._

_“Sir, every job has Fixed Worth. If I take more today, I’ll expect more Tomorrow. When that doesn’t come, I’ll be Unhappy. So I Prefer to take only what’s Fair. It Keeps me Content.”_

_I nodded slowly. “At least buy yourself a new wrench and saw. They’ll make your work easier.”_

_He chuckled softly. “Ah, Sir… Tools are Meant to Wear Out. That’s their Destiny. But Even when they’re Chipped or Cracked, they still Do their Job. Just like Senior People - a Few Scars Don’t make us Useless.”_

_He paused, then added, “When you Write in your Office, does it matter which Pen you Use? Expensive or Ordinary - if you know how to Write, you’ll Write well with Anything. But if you don’t, even the Costliest Pen Won’t help. The skill lies in the Hands, Not the Tool.”_

_I stood there Speechless. His Words Sank Deep. The Satisfaction on his Weathered Face was Something Rare - something Money Can’t buy._

*"A Thought to Treasure"*

_In our Endless Race for Wealth and Comfort._

*We often Forget the True “Tools” of Life* -

*HONESTY*,

*HARD WORK*,

*GRATITUDE*,

&

*CONTENTMENT*.

_When these are intact, Even Broken Tools can Create Miracles._

_But when they’re Missing, No Riches in the world can Fix the Leaks within us.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-word-religion-resists-definition-but-remains-necessary

Undefinable yet indispensable

Despite centuries of trying, the term ‘religion’ has proven impossible to define. Then why does it remain so necessary?

We tend to think of religion as an age-old feature of human existence. So it can be startling to learn that the very concept dates to the early modern era. Yes, you find gods, temples, sacrifices and rituals in the ancient Mediterranean, classical China, pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. What you don’t find is a term that quite maps onto ‘religion’.

What about the Romans, to whom we owe the word? Their notion of religio once meant something like scruples or exactingness, and then came to refer, among other things, to a scrupulous observance of rules or prohibitions, extending to worship practices. It was about doing the right thing in the right way. The Romans had other terms as well for customs, rites, obligations, reverence and social protocols, including cultus, ritus and superstitio. Yet they weren’t cordoned off into a realm that was separate from the workaday activities of public life, civic duty and family proprieties. What the Romans encountered abroad were, in their eyes, more or less eccentric versions of cultic life, rather than alien ‘religions’, in our sense. It was assumed that other localities would have other divinities; in times of war, you might even summon them, via evocatio, to try to get them to switch sides. But the local gods and rites of foreigners could be assessed without categorising them as instances of a single universal genus.

Even after the empire became officially Christian, you still don’t get our sense of ‘religions’. The Romans don’t start sorting the world into bounded systems analogous to ‘Christianity’, ‘Judaism’, ‘Manichaeism’, ‘Islam’ and so on. They have other, older sorting mechanisms, as Brent Nongbri elaborates in his terrific study Before Religion (2013). When Lactantius, in the 4th century, contrasts vera religio with falsae religiones, he means to distinguish right worship from wrong worship; he isn’t identifying other self-contained systems that might be lined up on a chart for comparison. The Christians of late antiquity didn’t view themselves as possessing one religion among many; they viewed themselves as possessing the truth.

To arrive at the modern category of religion, scholars now tend to think, you needed a complementary ‘secular’ sphere: a sphere that wasn’t, well, religious. That’s why the word’s modern, comparative sense wasn’t firmly established until the 17th century – Hugo Grotius’s De veritate religionis Christianae (1627) is one touchstone – at a time when European Christendom was both splintering and confronting unfamiliar worlds through exploration and conquest. Even as religion could be conceived as a special domain that might be isolated from law and politics, the traffic with ancient and non-European cultures forced reflection on what counted as ‘true religion’. It’s just that, when Europeans looked at India, Africa, China or the ancient Mediterranean, they sifted for Christian-like (and often Protestant-like) elements: a sacred text to anchor authority, a prophetic founder to narrate origins, a set of theological doctrines to sort out orthodoxy and heresy, and perhaps duties that offered a path to salvation. If a tradition didn’t provide these, scholars might helpfully supply them. In time, ‘world religions’ could be conjured up as bounded systems with creeds and essences, even when the local practices they subsumed were profoundly heterogeneous. Traditions with no founders were given founders; traditions with no single scripture were assigned canonical texts; diverse local rites were bundled into overarching systems.

As world religions took hold as a subject of academic study in the later 19th century, European scholars did their systematic best to treat disparate systems of practice and thought as members of a class. Buddhism became one test case. To call it a single ‘religion’, scholars first had to unify various practices of South, Central and East Asia, and then to decide whether a sometimes godless tradition could qualify. Such struggles over classification exposed a deeper uncertainty: how was ‘religion’ to be defined?

The great minds of the era had ideas. John Stuart Mill held that a religion must unite creed, sentiment and moral authority. Herbert Spencer thought that what religions shared was ‘the tacit conviction that the existence of the world with all it contains and all which surrounds it, is a mystery ever pressing for interpretation.’ The anthropologist Edward B Tylor proposed, as a minimum definition, ‘belief in spiritual beings’. The philologist Max Müller called religion a ‘mental faculty’, separate from ‘sense and reason’, by which humans apprehend the Infinite. For the Old Testament scholar and Orientalist William Robertson Smith, the true foundation of religious life was ritual – the binding force of collective acts. The sociologist Émile Durkheim’s own definition, in his classic The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), joined belief to behaviour and belonging: religion, he wrote, was ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things’ that united its adherents ‘into one moral community, called the Church’.

These definitions came up short because they excluded too much or included too much. Either they failed to net the fish you were after or they netted too much bycatch. Mill wanted creed, emotion and moral suasion in one package, but many traditions that Europeans encountered in the 19th century didn’t distribute those elements in anything like that pattern. Did a religion involve a metaphysical stance on the cosmos and our place within it – was it driven by the ever-pressing ontological mysteries that Spencer considered central? What we’d call ancient Judaism had very little of that; the biblical writers do not stand before the universe feeling compelled to develop a worldview; they stand within a covenantal drama, entwining law, story and communal identity. And then Müller’s definition could apply to a Romantic poet. (Wilhelm Müller, Max’s father, was a great one.) Dubious of belief-based accounts like Tylor’s, Robertson Smith had concluded that ‘the antique religions had for the most part no creed; they consisted entirely of institutions and practices,’ and ‘while the practice was rigorously fixed, the meaning attached to it was extremely vague.’ Robertson Smith’s own corrective faltered in the face of practices that were communal but not in any obvious way ‘sacred’, or traditions in which doctrine mattered intensely. Durkheim’s formula fatefully relied on a sharp division between sacred and profane that countless ethnographies would undermine.

Georg Simmel, writing around the turn of the 20th century, had already dismissed the ‘Open Sesame’ dream that a single word could unlock the mystery: ‘No light will ever be cast in the sibyllic twilight that, for us, surrounds the origin and nature of religion as long as we insist on approaching it as a single problem requiring only a single word for its solution.’ A few years later, William James complained about ‘verbal’ disputation, but then fell back on a recognisably Protestant formula, defining religion as ‘the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.’ The linguist Jane Ellen Harrison, in her study Themis (1912), refused to define religion at all: a definition, she said, ‘desiccates its object’.

In ‘traditional religions’, there’s a continuity between what we’d distinguish as the natural and the supernatural realm

In the decades that followed, followers of Durkheim foregrounded function, treating religion as a mechanism that bound together societies, comforted individuals, marked transitions, legitimised power. But saying what religion does wouldn’t necessarily tell you what religion was, and, anyway, these functions weren’t peculiar to religion. Clifford Geertz’s elegant formula from the 1960s cast religion as a ‘system of symbols’, one that establishes ‘powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations’. Yet this formula likewise went too big, opening the door to all sorts of political ideologies.

Evolutionary and cognitive theorists since have offered definitions of their own. The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, for instance, suggested that religion may amount to ‘belief in some kind of transcendental world … inhabited by spirit beings or forces (that may or may not take an interest in and influence the physical world …).’ Inevitably, these belief-oriented accounts run into the same complaints that earlier doxastic definitions had: they seem awfully Protestant, privileging inner conviction over outward form. Even if you bought into the ‘belief’ part, though, you could baulk at the ‘transcendental’ part. In many ‘traditional religions’, there’s a deep continuity between what we’d distinguish as the natural and the supernatural realm. In the Akan region of Ghana where I spent much of my childhood, people would appease or reproach their ancestors in the same spirit that they might wheedle or berate someone at a municipal office. As the anthropologist Robin Horton observed, so-called traditional religions are less like the Western notion of religion than they are like science: they aim at explanation, prediction and control. True, where science posited impersonal forces, traditional thought posited personal ones. But the underlying move from observed regularities to theoretical constructs was similar; what Europeans wanted to call religion was a pragmatic explanatory framework, reasonable given the available evidence, and part of the same conceptual space as folk biology, folk psychology and everyday causal reasoning.

By the late 20th century, hopes for a definition had faded. Some theorists turned to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblance’. The thought is that traditions can belong to the same conceptual family because they overlap in crisscrossing ways – like cousins who share a nose here, a chin there, without any feature that they all have in common. It’s a permissive approach: you map the ripple of resemblances and give up on strict boundaries. Unfortunately, those resemblances always depend on what you pick as your prototype. If you start with Protestant Christianity, you’ll find resemblances that matter to Protestants; begin instead with Yoruba orisha devotion, and you’ll trace a very different set of likenesses.

The anthropologist Talal Asad influentially and illuminatingly traced both ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ to the political and intellectual habits of Western modernity. Yet in his account, religion sometimes seems more an effect of those forces than a cause, more a product of power rather than a power in itself. And even if you think that the phenomena we cluster under the term have been sorted and named by Western modernity, you could wonder how we could be sure that they’re examples of the same thing.

Was the category beyond redemption? The scholar and minister Wilfred Cantwell Smith, whose book The Meaning and End of Religion (1962) had meticulously detailed the belated emergence of the ‘religion’ concept in Europe, long maintained that talk of ‘religion’ conflated too many things not to cause mischief, and urged that we give up such talk altogether; we should, instead, speak of faith and ‘cumulative tradition’. The anthropologist and historian Daniel Dubuisson, who anathematised ‘religion’ as a 19th-century Western imposition on non-Western worlds, urged that it be replaced with ‘cosmographic formation’. These evasive manoeuvres, in turn, have met with scepticism. As the social theorist Martin Riesebrodt drily observed, neologisms like Dubuisson’s could doubtless be shown to ‘have also been “constructed” through historically specific discourses’ and revealed as ‘instruments in the linguistic battle between classes or cultures.’ Besides, he pointed out, those who would eliminate the term ‘religion’ seldom manage long without it.

So how has ‘religion’, as a concept and category, endured in the absence of a stable definition? To answer that question, it may help to think about how referring expressions do their referring. Some terms keep their grip on the world even as our understanding of what they denote changes radically; others, once central to serious thought, fall away when their supposed referents are deemed illusions. What distinguishes the survivors from the casualties?

Think about our names for ‘natural kinds’. These are meant to pick out groupings that are found not just in our heads but in nature: bosons, barium, bonobos, beech trees. The things these names designate are thought to have causal powers, explanatory roles or underlying properties that justify treating them as more than convenient fictions. When we name a natural kind, what we’re naming is really out there in the world. Anyway, that’s the aim. How do we decide when we’ve got it right?

Start with chemistry, and the question of what counts as an acid. When the term was first used, it referred simply to substances that tasted sour, or acidus. Later they were marked out by what they did: etching metal, losing their bite in contact with alkalis. In 1777, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier was convinced that acidity came from a common ingredient he called oxygen – oxygène, the ‘acid-producer’. He was wrong. Yet we’d say that when Lavoisier spoke of acids, he was referring to the same class of things we mean by the word.

A century on, chemists refined the concept. Svante Arrhenius defined acids by their propensity to dissociate in water and release hydrogen ions; in 1923, Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted and Thomas Martin Lowry each reconceived them as proton donors; Gilbert Lewis broadened the net again by calling acids electron-pair acceptors. Each shift expanded the boundaries, but none made the term obsolete. The word survived because its targets – the substances doing the dissolving and reacting – were real enough to anchor it even as its theoretical profile changed.

It’s the difference between a bad map of a real country and a map of Atlantis. Only the first can be fixed

Not every scientific term has been so lucky. In 1774, Joseph Priestley isolated a gas he took to be ‘dephlogisticated air’. Phlogiston was supposed to be a substance released during combustion, the invisible essence of burning. What he had actually found, we’d say, was what we know as oxygen, the name derived from that discarded theory of Lavoisier’s. Unlike oxygen, nothing in the world behaved as phlogiston was said to behave. Indeed, it was Lavoisier who brought the curtain down on phlogiston; closed-system experiments, which he conducted with his wife and lab assistant Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier, showed that combustion involved the gain of a component of air (namely, oxygen) rather than the loss of an invisible essence. The phlogiston concept evaporated because chemists came to see that it referred to nothing at all. Priestley’s ‘dephlogisticated air’, by contrast, referred successfully despite being misdescribed: his experiments had latched on to a real thing, even if his theory of it was wrong.

This difference between a term that refers despite error and one that refers to nothing is the difference between a bad map of a real country and a map of Atlantis. Only the first can be fixed. Philosophers have used such cases to argue that successful reference doesn’t depend on getting the description right. What matters is the causal connection between our words and the things they’re meant to denote. The strategy is straightforward enough: if you want to know what object a word refers to, find the thing that gives the best causal explanation of the central features of uses of that word. The features that drove Lavoisier’s acid-talk were produced by substances we still recognise as acids, which is why we don’t treat him as having been talking about some other thing, or about nothing at all. Causal theories of reference explain why our words can target the same class of object even when our conception of it shifts, and when the boundaries of the class shift, too. Pluto can stop being a planet without shaking the foundations of ‘planet’ talk. In such theories of reference, a word continues to refer, so long as it stands in the right causal relation to the entity that gives rise to its use. Misdescribed objects can survive conceptual upheavals; nonexistent ones can’t.

Even in the natural sciences, though, classes of things can fall between those stools. ‘Luminiferous ether’ is a case in point: an invisible medium once thought to carry light waves, it was indispensable to 19th-century physics yet eventually dissolved into what came to be called electromagnetic fields. Was ‘ether’ simply a phantasm? Some philosophers think we could well have retained the term, redefining it to mean the very fields that replaced it. Albert Einstein himself, who once helped kill the ether idea, later repurposed the term as the relativistic ether of spacetime, a field with its own geometry. Other theorists suspect that our ‘electromagnetic fields’ may eventually go the way of ether.

If there can be uncertainty about objects within the natural sciences, the wicket gets stickier when we move into the historical and social realm. Here the things we name – revolutions, nations, money, marriage, religion – are doubly human products, being products first of our collective activity, then of our collective description. These entities are what the philosopher Sally Haslanger would call ‘socially founded’ (a term she uses to sidestep the confusions associated with ‘socially constructed’). Many philosophers of language now call such entities social kinds.

To approach religion as a social kind isn’t to say that it’s as referentially sound as other familiar examples of this sort. Religion may, in fact, be in worse shape than most. It belongs to that subcategory of social kinds that living people apply to themselves. Some social kinds, like ‘recession’, can be defined externally, without the participation of those they describe. Economists can declare one to have happened in the 1870s, even if no one at the time felt it by that name. Others, like ‘wedding’, depend on shared recognition: you cannot hold one without a community that believes in weddings. ‘Religion’, like many social kinds, functions in both ways. Anthropologists can use the term to describe practices that their participants would never call religions, yet, once the label circulates, it acquires a reflexive power: believers come to organise their self-understanding around it. In this respect, religion is a product of classification that helps to shape the reality it describes.

The philosopher Ian Hacking captured this feedback loop with his idea of dynamic nominalism – the process by which classifications and people classified reshape one another. Categories create kinds. The heavy drinker is seen, and sees himself, as an alcoholic. The word doesn’t merely label the phenomenon – it helps to constitute it. Hacking later preferred to call this ‘dialectical realism’, on the grounds that what emerges from the loop (labels affecting those labelled, which then affects the label) is, by any reasonable measure, real enough. When you’ve been told that what you have is a religion, what’s affected isn’t just how you relate to it but what you think you are.

If ‘religion’ endures, it’s because the word still does work, practical and theoretical

Where does this leave someone trying to understand human life through such refractory terms? We might concede that ‘religion’ resists a unitary meaning and proceed case by case, choosing the angle that best reveals what we need to make visible. When speaking of the Abrahamic faiths, a practice-centred approach may capture the lived textures of ritual and observance. The propositions of the Nicene or the Athanasian Creed are, after all, obscure and arguably incoherent, but the act of avowing them carries weighty significance. When we’re turning to the ‘traditional’ thought of the Azande, the Nuer or the Asante, by contrast, a belief-centred, even neo-Tylorian, lens may illuminate elements that the modern Christian model hides from view. Each emphasis is bound to clarify something that the other leaves obscure.

The larger truth is that we’ve always navigated the world with models that merely approximate it, with varying degrees of adequacy. As Hans Vaihinger argued in The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (1911), we often reason through fictions we judge ‘true enough’, because making use of them helps us act, anticipate and understand. The map may not be the territory, but we’d be lost without it. And the sciences, social and natural alike, advance through such tolerable falsehoods. Their worth lies in the utility of their results.

If ‘religion’ endures, it’s because the word still does work, practical and theoretical. It orders law and policy, directs research, and shapes the inner lives of those who use it. Sociologists can enquire into its relation to charity or suicide; psychologists can study its connection to prejudice or wellbeing. In the United States, legislators and judges must have a sufficient grasp of the category that they can balance the Constitutional dos and don’ts of ‘accommodation’ and ‘non-establishment’. For the religionist, meanwhile, it continues to name a space where meaning is made, defended or denied. Whatever else it may be, ‘religion’ remains a category with too many stakeholders to be fired by fiat. When it comes to what the word means, no one gets to say, and everyone gets a say.

Of course, scholarship itself requires observance – with respect to its own standards of evidence, and on the discipline of paying attention. To be observant, in this sense, is to watch the world closely without pretending to stand outside it. And so we try to use our terms with care, aware of what they can hide from sight and of how much they still let us see. We begin where we are, with the tools our history leaves us, and we make do, even if we suspect that our models may someday be replaced. For now, religion endures as a shared act of attention: one of those serviceable maps by which we try to find our bearings, and to keep faith with the world.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University and the author, most recently, of Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science (2025)

https://apnews.com/photo-gallery/climate-change-environment-weather-photos-2025-6981b6aff56a36e054b85bbb76d1d449

AP photographers capture destruction, heartache and resilience as climate change advanced in 2025

https://www.popsci.com/gear/best-of-whats-new-2025/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_12_11&position=1&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=aeb0eefd-e47e-4514-9d3f-7f992b2a7337&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.popsci.com%2Fgear%2Fbest-of-whats-new-2025%2F

The 50 greatest innovations of 2025 The 38th annual Best of What's New awards.

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-be-the-archivist-of-your-familys-stories-and-relics?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_12_11&position=9&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=abf4cf9d-c358-4590-b5e5-7716ebc662e6&url=https%3A%2F%2Fpsyche.co%2Fguides%2Fhow-to-be-the-archivist-of-your-familys-stories-and-relics

How to be the archivist of your own family

By curating your family’s stories, rituals and relics, you’ll feel anchored – and create a bridge between the generations

I’d always been interested in the stories my parents and grandparents told about their lives in Iraq, which seemed so impossibly distant from my childhood in 1970s London. It was only when I became a mother that I suddenly felt I needed to record these stories and pin them down somehow – to create an archive – so I could have a hope of passing them on.

My sense of urgency was sharpened by the fact that our language, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, is going extinct. I charted my journey into archiving my family’s stories, language, recipes, culture and keepsakes in a book, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture (2025), published in the US as Always Carry Salt. While I was doing it, I realised I wasn’t the only one to feel this instinct to preserve and pass on. Perhaps it was the fact that we are living through troubled times, or that my friends are now in midlife, but I noticed many of them were doing similar things.

If you too are drawn to the idea of making a family archive, this Guide will help you decide what kind of archive you want to make – it doesn’t have to be a book! – and how to go about it.

For one of my friends, it was losing her mother that prompted her to research her mother’s ancestors, eventually making a wall of photographs that ranged from black-and-white images of Edwardian women in picture hats to vivid portraits of her young daughters: a sort of feminist lineage. Another friend, about to move back to his hometown, found himself reaching for the snooker cue he’d inherited from his father who had died years before. It was not just a tactile and beautifully crafted talisman, but an object he used and enjoyed, connecting to his father every time he picked it up.

Whatever your starting point, there are many reasons to make a family archive. It can make you feel more psychologically whole – or at least declutter your loft. It can help you understand where you come from so you know where you are going – and it can deepen your relationship with your cousins. I found the process healing, settling, connecting. On the other side of it, I feel as though I am a stronger bridge between my ancestors and future generations. And I feel more confident about owning my heritage, experimenting with it and enjoying it too.

Don’t be put off by the word ‘archive’. You’re probably not going to end up with a museum-worthy collection stored in acid-free tissue paper and sealed in a vault. (Although you might.) I ended up with a book, but only because I’m a writer and writing is how I process things. You might end up with a photo album with detailed captions, or a shoebox full of treasured (but not necessarily valuable) objects, or a family tree, or a file on your computer with recordings of conversations with your grandmother. You might not end up with anything physical at all; the process might be more important to you than anything else.

You may want to go back centuries, or to cover only one or two generations. You may even want to make a sort of time-capsule archive that is a snapshot of your family now. You may want to explore both sides of your family or just one. Your family may have lots of what UNESCO calls tangible culture (like objects, documents, photographs, jewellery) or perhaps they might have more of what UNESCO calls intangible culture (like music, rituals, dances), and this will affect what kind of archive you make.

Sometimes you might feel like a detective, while other times you might feel more like a therapist. The research might be an intellectual exercise or you might feel connected back through the generations in a very primal, physical way.

This Guide will give you some ideas for how to make your archive, and different approaches and ideas about what you end up with. You don’t need any special skills, and it can take as much or as little time as you like. However you do it, making a family archive can be a hugely rewarding and meaningful journey to go on.

What to do

Set an intention

Before you plunge in, think about why you are making an archive, and for whom. For instance, are you doing it as a hobby or because there is painful history you want to confront? Are you just curious, or are you trying to preserve unique family stories or document precious artefacts? My main motivation was wanting to pass on my cultural heritage to my son but, because my family is part of a community whose story has rarely been told, I also wanted to turn my archive into a book for others to read. Being clear about your intentions will help to point you in the right direction.

Make a plan

Next, write down what you already know about your family – and what you have access to. Then make a list of what you want to find out more about, given your initial intentions for the archive.

You don’t have to cover everything – in fact you can’t. So follow your interests or instincts. There might be emotional reasons you are drawn to particular stories. I was initially interested in my father’s grandfather because, as a scribe who wrote Torah scrolls, he spent his days writing, just as I do – even if he didn’t use a laptop but vellum and a pen made out of a reed from the River Tigris. But when I learned that much of his work would have involved repairing scrolls others had made, his life of making and repairing became a touchstone for me.

For the oral historian Mi’Jan Celie Tho-Biaz, learning about her great-great-grandmother’s journey from slavery to freedom became a source of strength, as she told BBC Future last year: ‘My DNA is made of people who have defied odds, I come from people who worked to attain freedom and love. The huge stakes and odds they beat, just for me to exist … makes you feel like you have superpowers.’

Decide about scope. How many generations will you go back? Will you cover both sides of the family? If you live in the same place your family has always lived, or at least in the same country, it might be relatively easy to go back quite a long way using parish records, but if your family has been uprooted like mine, it might be harder.

Now, draw up a list of anyone you’d like to talk to, whether to gather stories or just to ask about your findings. I decided to interview just three family members, and to start with my grandmother, as her story began further back in time, and then talked to my parents, so that I was having the conversations in roughly chronological order. I asked their permission and made sure they were comfortable with the idea; your relatives may well be anxious, so it’s worth starting by listening to their concerns, and trying to address them.

If there are sensitivities – perhaps someone doesn’t want a secret spilled, or there’s bad blood between relatives – you might be selective in who you speak to. Alternatively, perhaps you’ll interview everyone and let the contradictions speak for themselves. The novelist Kevin Nguyen wrote in The New York Times this year that when his father interviewed his family about their life in Vietnam and they all disagreed, he felt these inconsistencies were ‘the beauty of it’, and that the different stories had a Rashomon effect that added up to ‘an emotional history’ rather than a factual one.

Consider finding an ally or a companion. A relative might help you navigate tensions, or help with research, or act as a sounding board. Throughout my process, I kept a WhatsApp group going with my brother and some cousins; it was helpful, and also reminded me why I was doing it.

Finally, decide whether you plan to share your archive or whether it’s just for you. If you’re sharing, will it be with your children and siblings only, or the wider family, or even with a museum for researchers and the general public to access? Think about what this decision means for how you make the archive. If you’re sharing with anyone at all, you might want to make sure your notes are clear and legible – perhaps you’ll type them up as you go along.

Think of your plan as a roadmap. Remember you can always go off route. The potter Edmund de Waal started out wanting to write about the French craze for Japanese art and to research the cousin of his great-grandfather who first acquired the 264 netsuke (tiny Japanese sculptures) that he’d inherited. But he soon realised he had a bigger story on his hands; in his book The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), he writes about how the netsuke were passed down the generations of his Jewish family and daringly saved from the Nazis.

The next steps describe some practical ways to begin creating your archive. Depending on your plan, you might choose to follow all or only some of them (some may be irrelevant). Feel free to focus on what is most important and meaningful for you.

Make a photo album

Photographs are a good place to start for many archives, because most families have some, and because they can trigger memories and stories, so it makes sense to gather them before you start interviewing anyone. You may want to digitise the pictures, especially if you don’t have many, or if they’re deteriorating or scattered among different relatives.

As a technophobe, this terrified me, until I learned that all I had to do was take pictures of the photos. I used my phone. I photographed each picture, then labelled each file with a number. If they had anything written on the back, I photographed that and labelled the file with the same number followed by b for ‘back’.

Consider making more detailed captions than you would for holiday snaps, and leave space for what you learn if you show the pictures to relatives. Finding a group portrait of my grandfather’s family, I could (roughly) locate it to Basra, where he grew up, and guess at the date because his father was wearing a tarboosh, a felt hat worn during Ottoman times but rarely afterwards, but it took a conversation with my mother to realise that the child caught in motion, blurred, was probably my grandfather’s brother who had died at seven. I would never have been able to find this out by myself. I hadn’t even known he existed.

Make a family cookbook

If there is a cookbook that’s popular among your older relatives, especially if they come from a specific food culture, consider getting a copy and annotating it – for example, noting the dishes used for specific family occasions such as festivals or birthdays. Or you might find what you need online; in her book Crying in H Mart (2021), the musician Michelle Zauner describes how she felt cut off from the Korean part of herself after she lost her mother, and learned from a Korean YouTuber called Maangchi the family recipes her mother had never had time to pass on.

Ask relatives for recipes they have written down that you can photograph – so you’re not just recording the recipes but their handwriting, their doodles, their notes. Or video them making special dishes, and write up the recipes afterwards. Also, ask them to reminisce about any rituals attached to the recipes, or about favourite childhood foods: this often unlocks amazing memories, and might prompt more recipes too.

Catalogue your heirlooms

This sounds grand, but I mean any physical thing that you’ve inherited – valuable or everyday. Take photographs of what you have, and write down whatever you find out about it.

Think about how to look after your heirlooms; you might ask a jeweller to buff up jewellery, get a painting framed, or restore a piece of furniture.

You might also want to use your heirlooms. In The Heart-Shaped Tin (2025), the food writer Bee Wilson explores the memories that kitchenware holds, and the magic of using even the most mundane kitchen objects when they have been handed down and carry love. For many years, her friend the chef and food writer Roopa Gulati felt that her parents’ precious ‘best’ china was too good to use, and feared that she wouldn’t be able to bear it if it broke. But when Gulati’s husband was diagnosed with a brain tumour, she started using the china, so it would hold the foods she made, witness the conversation of another generation, her children, and make even breakfast a celebration. If you have been storing and protecting your heirlooms, it might feel more life-enhancing, and keep more memories alive, to use them.

Interview relatives and write down their stories

I thought I knew my family’s stories but many I’d heard piecemeal, in an interrupted way or by eavesdropping. I’d mixed them up, got the sequence wrong, or never asked the questions I needed to make sense of things – and my family had protected me from painful things. Whether you know your family’s stories or not, sitting down with your relatives and asking questions can be revelatory.

I began by checking they were happy to talk. I explained what I was doing, and why. I told them I’d like to record and that I’d visit them at home whenever was convenient, so they were more comfortable, and I could record without background noise, and also because they often had photos to show me.

I prepared before my visit by generating ideas for clear and open-ended questions based on reading relevant books or family documents and by drawing on what I knew already about favourite foods and earliest childhood memories. I used photos and objects to spark memories. To put them at their ease, I brought a notebook, not a laptop.

Once there, I had a cup of tea or a meal with them and chatted about normal things before getting out my phone to record; a phone felt less scary than any other device. I didn’t interrogate anyone; I made it a conversation. If they didn’t remember details, I made a note to ask again. I always went more than once, because I had follow-up questions, and also because they often remembered more after I’d stopped recording.

I kept the recordings as well as the transcripts because it wasn’t just the stories I wanted but their voices and quirks too. I chose to write up the stories, but you don’t have to.

Archive letters, diaries and documents

If you’re lucky enough to have letters and diaries from family members, this could be quite a crucial part of your archive, and you might want to transcribe them and give them context through interviews and research.

Even if, like me, you have next to nothing, you might want your archive to include some of the basic documents, such as birth, marriage, civil partnership and death certificates, and possibly immigration and adoption records. These documents can provide footholds to help you research further, and sometimes they can illuminate lost stories.

If the documents are lost, you can often track them down. In the UK, good resources include the General Register Office (for births, marriages and deaths), the London Archives (for parish, tax, education and poorhouse records), the National Archives (for military records, wills, immigration documents) and the Find My Past website. If you live elsewhere, your own country is likely to have similar resources.

Make a playlist

If music is important to your family, you may want to make a playlist with the reasons why, or to gather sheet music, to catalogue a vinyl collection or even learn a particular dance. When my son was born, I wanted to sing him Iraqi Jewish lullabies but my family didn’t know any. However, I learned a song traditionally sung by the mother of the groom before a wedding, and I have written it down, with several verses and variations, so that hopefully I can sing it for him in future. You might also want to trace a musical thread through your family tree, like the singer Pixie Lott who discovered her ‘musical genes’ on an episode of the TV show Who Do You Think You Are? when she learned that her great-great-grandfather was an army musician (it’s worth visiting the series’ website for other inspiring stories).

Sharing your archive

If you want to share your archive, make sure you feel comfortable with how you do it.

If what you’ve found out about your family’s past is difficult, think about how to share it sensitively. When the cultural historian Clair Wills uncovered the story of her cousin who was born in one of Ireland’s notorious mother and baby homes, lived cast out from her family, and died tragically, she chose not to blame her family but instead to argue for collective responsibility, as she described in her powerful memoir Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets (2024). You can’t change the past, but you might be able to help people do better in future.

If there are secrets, think about who might be hurt by sharing them, but also about the fact that Carl Jung called secrets ‘psychic poison’. Sometimes, sharing secrets can stop them being a source of shame and isolation. Talking about difficult things openly might also help you and your family, not just in dealing with old troubles but in facing what comes next.

Think about how to share at least some of your archive with pleasure. Perhaps you could cook everyone family recipes and then give them copies of the cookbook you’ve made, or play the photographs you’ve gathered as a slideshow.

Even after you share (or don’t) you will probably feel you haven’t finished. You might want to learn more – and relatives might carry on telling you stories long after you’d planned to stop. It’s OK to say no, and it’s also OK to stop archiving and then come back to it later if you want to. But you might find that archiving becomes a habit, a way of processing life as it happens, and even a source of joy.

Learn more

Preparing for difficult emotions

Because of the memories or revelations it stirs up, archiving can be emotional – I wasn’t prepared for how much. You might want to consider speaking to a therapist while you make the archive; I did. I also found it very important to talk to friends and family as I went along.

You may come to realise you are carrying generational trauma. The psychotherapist Julia Samuel wrote in Every Family Has a Story (2022) that if trauma is unprocessed, it goes to the next generation, and the next, until someone is prepared to feel the pain and try to understand it; you may find you have to wrestle with or work through the difficult legacy you’ve inherited.

The inherited trauma could even be in your body. Working first with Vietnam veterans, then with Holocaust survivors and then their children, the psychiatrist Rachel Yehuda has researched how trauma might be passed down through epigenetic changes – modifications that affect how genes are expressed. She doesn’t believe, though, that we are prisoners of our biology; she suggests we can work through trauma through therapy, friendship, love, or channelling it into social justice.

Simply learning more about your family’s stories could help you understand the trauma you are carrying (if any) – and perhaps help you set down the burden, or carry it more lightly. I also found it helpful to think about the ways my relatives have passed on strategies for generational healing – I noticed the way my family gets together a lot, the way we tell and retell stories, and the humour that leavens the difficult ones.

It’s also important to prepare for the possibility that, rather than dealing with generational trauma, you may instead be confronted with its flipside: generational guilt. These discoveries might be uncomfortable, but there are likely ways you can make amends. When the Scottish author Cal Flyn discovered that her ancestor had massacred Indigenous Australians, she channelled her shock into taking some responsibility by confronting and documenting the crimes, raising awareness and fighting efforts to erase the past, which resulted in her book Thicker than Water (2016).

Whatever you find, hopefully you will finish the process, as I did, feeling more anchored, connected, grounded and rooted. I felt I belonged more, and had more of a sense of purpose; knowing where you come from really can help you know where you are going. The process made me forge stronger bonds with my family, too. And I’m not the only one. In the 2000s, the psychologists Marshall Duke, Robyn Fivush and Amber Lazarus of Emory University in the US asked children a series of questions about their family history. Their research showed that children with a strong family narrative were more connected, resilient – and much happier. It’s never too late to write down this narrative for your own family.

Key points

There are many reasons to make a family archive. It can make you feel more psychologically whole. You’ll better understand where you come from so you know where you are going. It can also help you act as a bridge between your ancestors and future generations.

Set your intentions. Spend some time thinking about why you are making an archive and for whom. Being clear about your intentions will point you in the right direction as you get started.

Make a plan. Make a list of what you want to find out – follow your interests and instincts, and remember your initial intentions. Decide on the scope of your archive. Draw up a list of who you want to talk to. Consider finding an ally or companion, and decide whether you plan to share your archive.

Make a photo album. Photographs are a good place to start for many archives, because most families have some, and because they can trigger memories and stories, so it makes sense to gather them before you start interviewing anyone.

Make a family cookbook. Ask relatives for recipes they have written down that you can photograph – so you’re not just recording the recipes but their handwriting, their doodles, their notes.

Catalogue your heirlooms. This sounds grand, but I mean any physical thing that you’ve inherited – valuable or everyday. Take photographs of what you have and write down whatever you find out about it.

Interview relatives and write down their stories. Whether or not you already know your family’s stories, sitting down with your relatives and asking questions can be revelatory. Consider keeping recordings as well as the transcripts so you retain not just the stories but also their voices and quirks.

Archive letters, diaries and documents. If you’re lucky enough to have letters and diaries from family members, this could be quite a crucial part of your archive, and you might want to transcribe them and give them context through interviews and research.

Make a playlist. If music is important to your family, you may want to make a playlist with the reasons why, or to gather sheet music, to catalogue a vinyl collection or even learn a particular dance.

Sharing your archive. Think about how to share at least some of your archive with pleasure. Perhaps you could cook everyone family recipes and then give them copies of the cookbook you’ve made, or play the photographs you’ve gathered as a slideshow.

Samantha Ellis is the author of How to be a Heroine (2014), Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life (2017) and Chopping Onions on my Heart (2025), forthcoming in the US as Always Carry Salt (2026). She is also a playwright, and lives in London, U