Back in 1988 I was living in Michigan and my grandmother came to visit. While she was there I interviewed her and filled three audiocassete tapes with stories. Just last year I paid to have the tapes transferred to CD, to preserve them.
We also have a lot of genealogical info from her family, thanks to folks who cared and a relative, in the late 1800’s who wrote a book about the family history, with tons of names and dates going back to 1722. And my grandmother has a remarkable memory for names and dates, which has always helped.
A very distant relation(I figured it out to be third cousin five times removed) is also listed in a couple of nation cyclopedias of biography, and they list his heritage, giving us more information. This guy was postmaster General, ambassador to Austria-Hungary, and was commissioned, for the centennial of the Constitution, in 1889, to write the “official” government history of that document.
Last September we had a family reunion of her husband’s family(my grandfather) and when they took the “oldest/youngest” picture, Grandma was featured with a twelve day old baby. Think of all the time between those two!