This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Shimita Bessu. Today, the power of

recording your family history. When Elizabeth Keating's mother died in 2014, Elizabeth had some regrets.

I realized after she died that I didn't know very much about her as a person.

There were all of these gaps in what she knew about her mother's life.

How she grew up and what formed her as a person.

So many questions she had never asked her.

I wish I'd asked my mother about the kind of things that she saw every day

when she was walking to school and the sort of fears that she

had and what was dating like?

I wish I had known a lot more.

Elizabeth is an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin.

She's traveled all over the world, talking to people, trying to understand how they communicate, how they

articulate their values and their character, and she realized she had never thought to apply that

kind of thinking to her own mom.

So she came up with a list of questions

that most of us haven't asked our family members.

Questions about their childhood, their friendships.

And she tested this out with some of her students,

sending them off to have conversations with their families.

They loved the project, and they brought back to class so many fascinating stories. It really opened up whole worlds to them and also to me.

So I became really determined to write a book so that other people

wouldn't miss out like I had finding out about their mothers, fathers,

...