As a journalist and writer, I’ve often harshly accused myself of never having an original thought. I spent 30 years writing and re-telling the thoughts or actions of others. In the midst of that career, I often adopted the causes of my interview subjects as my own, subtly using my journalistic and writing training to raise the promotional flag over things as diverse as economic development and school tax levy issues.

Now that the Medicare era of my life has settled in, I’m still taking on someone else’s mission.

I completed my mother’s memoir because cancer took that task from her. I’m now trying to finish the cross stitch quilt she started 20 years ago. But even more consuming than inserting a needle with blue thread into the stamped floral pattern of a king size spread is my mother’s mission of urging others to record their personal histories.

I spout this adopted mantra in speaking engagements and workshops and in a new memoir writing session I’m now facilitating. And in going over Mother’s “greenhouse file” of writings this week, I ran across correspondence from her cousin Jeff. The letter was dated 1998 and it contained an address and phone number. Taking a chance that this lost cousin was still living at the address and could be reached at the number, I dialed the phone. Yes, Jeff was still there and living only a few blocks away from my own home.

We made arrangements to meet. I wanted to give him a copy of my mother’s now decade-old memoir and remind him of their shared family narrative. He gave me much more.

This man, who would be my second cousin (and don’t ask how many times removed because trying to figure that out causes my eyes to glaze over in incomprehension), pulled out a hefty notebook labeled “Hoffmeister.” Its pages contained family photos I had never seen in my mother’s albums. I saw photos of my orphaned great-grandfather, who had come to America from Berlin in the late 1800s to homestead in Kansas. The only previous image I had of him was as an older grandfather figure, beloved by my mother. Here he was, a young, handsome rake with a handlebar mustache and a mischievous glint in his eyes.

My own grandfather had a page of his own in the album, paired with his first wife. I never knew that about Grandpa Jim.

Cousin Jeff, a retired electrical engineer with a penchant for preciseness, had the whole family tree in that hefty album. Also included were letters to and from the American Embassy in Berlin by the son of my great-grandfather’s brother. He came over from Berlin after Grandpa Otto earned enough in the States for his passage, then later changed his name to Hoffman to seem less obviously German during World War I. The embassy letters from his son sought genealogy information on the parents of the two boys, August and Augusta Hoffmeister, who had died during a cholera epidemic. The Catholic orphanage where the brothers had grown up had burned or been bombed during one of the big wars, so the search hit a dead end. The parents, our German ancestors, could not be traced.

There is, of course, a moral to this ancestral meandering.

Cousin Jeff is elderly. He will not be with us much longer and the stories he has to tell, the research he has completed, should not end in the inevitable trashing that may be the fate of his big notebooks. It is up to all of us, as members of a family, to keep the stories alive by retelling them, recording them in some way, so our own descendants will never come to a dead end. They don’t know it yet, but someday they will want to find out from whom and whence they came.