This is in conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shemitah Basu.
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 families, 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, grandparents, aunts and uncles and what their lives were like.
Elizabeth's book is called the Essential Questions.
It's a practical guide to recording interviews with your elder family members, taking you through each step of the process and listing questions you might have never thought to ask.