Capturing Family Histories: A Conversation with Jamie Yuenger of StoryKeep
Jamie Yuenger is the visionary founder and CEO of StoryKeep, a premier legacy media company specializing in preserving family stories and histories through legacy films and private podcasts. With a background in folklore and documentary media, Jamie began her career in public radio. In 2010, a transformative, lightening-ride moment occurred while interviewing a man who had lived through the Great Depression, igniting her passion to "apply professional media skills to the private stories of families."
In 2019, Jamie’s Dutch husband, Piet Hurkmans, joined the company. Piet, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, had explored lesser-known corners of the world, highlighting people's struggles and transformations. Together, they now lead StoryKeep, making it a family-run business.
Jamie is passionate about helping individuals and families build long-term resilience. Through her writing, speaking, and guidance, she helps families identify, foster, and pass on their resilience narratives.
Kirby Rosplock
Welcome to the Tamarind Learning podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Kirby Rosplock, and I'm so excited. We have Jamie Yuenger today with us from Story Keep. She is an amazing filmmaker. She creates and captures incredible narratives and family histories. And she has so much to share with us today about narratives and the resilience that they can bring to family. So I'm so grateful because Jamie and I have so many things in common, including we get to work with our wonderful spouses and doing what we love in our family businesses. And we have so many great things to dig into today because Jamie's approach to capturing family histories is unlike any other documentary film historian that I've ever met. So I'm super excited I'm excited to be here with Jamie today because as a podcast guest, she's like no other. So Jamie, welcome.
Jamie Yuenger
Well, that's a tall order. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really glad to be here. I'm looking forward to diving into these topics.
Kirby Rosplock
Well, Jamie, maybe first you can just tell us, how did you come to do this work? I mean, this is pretty inspiring, passionate type of profession that you don't just stumble into. You have to probably have a calling. So I'm just really curious how you found yourself to be doing it.
Jamie Yuenger
Yeah, it very much was a calling. I feel like at a singular moment in my life, I was spoken to in a real way. And I think that happens for people when they are in a quiet place and they can really hear intuition calling. I always love to talk to people. I think we were, I, was seven when my family moved from Colorado to Louisiana. My mom was in the school going around to teachers, having me say goodbye to my teachers. We went to my physical education teacher, Mr. Peterson, I still remember. He said to my mom, Well, you don't have to worry about Jamie because she's never going to meet a stranger. You can get a sense of my personality as a young person. Many years later, I had studied radio documentary. I went to a graduate program, like a theater school for NPR, National Public Radio. If people are familiar with this American life, that podcasting way of telling stories, That's what I went to school for. I landed an internship at the New York City Affiliate of NPR, WNYC, which is a boon of a place to land, and I hated the job.
Jamie Yuenger
I really was miserable there. I didn't really want to be assigned stories in the way that you are when you're a junior in that space. Just about that time, a good friend of mine asked if she could hire me independently to interview her father-in-law and document his life story. He had lived through the Great Depression. He had started a business in China. She wanted her children to know him, in her words, warts and all. I found that to be a very compelling project. I sat with him, Lou Zandily, for, I think, a series of 10 sessions. At that time, I was just doing audio only. And around the third or fourth session sitting with Lou, this was like a lightning bolt, striking me, just saying, You're supposed to be applying everything you learn professionally, but to the private lives of families, to this situation, this context. I don't know if you've ever had that experience where you just have a very strong, intuitive feeling about something. There's nothing that's going to get in your way because you just feel in your bones that that's what the right thing to do is. I started right away, immediately, doing this work.
Jamie Yuenger
I think I sent an email to 20 people in my social space, telling them, basically the idea of what it was. I think at the time, I was calling it audio heirlooms or something very convoluted like that. Five people hired me out of those 20 people. It was a really great moment of just learning what I was doing and what business this might be. And that was 14 years ago, and a lot has happened since then. Namely, mostly we make films. Now also, private podcasts, which is like what I was doing then, but putting things on a CD. So it's evolved. So that's the origin story of StoryKeep.
Kirby Rosplock
That's amazing. And family stories are incredible, right? I mean, this is stranger than fiction, and that is, honest to God, something I know in spades from many of the families I work with. Unfortunately, I sign too many NDAs, so with all these incredible stories that I'm always like, I wish I could tell just one or two of them. But I'm sure you get to hear the most incredible stories. Tell us why family narratives are so powerful, and what do you exactly mean by family narrative?
Jamie Yuenger
I think it's a really interesting and important term to bring into this space with families. I think it's getting to become a more known But by family narrative, which is different than a story or storytelling, family narrative is really the compendium or the series of stories that a family has. There can be thousands, obviously, because you could have hundreds of family members and they all have their own stories. But this series of stories, it all has, if you look at it as a whole, it has overarching ideas and a sense of personality, and there are values embedded in those stories. Altogether, whether those stories are really telling the family, the individual members, and as a collective, who they are, where they've come from, and I think, most importantly, who they can become. Because in those stories, there is resilience, as we may talk about later, a sense of perseverance, a sense of all kinds of other things, stubbornness, creativity, et cetera, that give people who hear those stories, the younger generations of the family, a sense of what possible, a sense of the continuing storyline. So family narrative is that whole picture as opposed to a single story.
Jamie Yuenger
And I think differently than nowadays, storytelling is often used as a PR, branding marketing language, which is its own thing. But when we really talk about story here, we're talking about a series of events, true in this case, or true as we know it, that has meaning, that has a depth to what happens. So it's not just, I went to the store and bought the milk. That's not really a story in our mind. The story has to have some metaphor historical underlying meaning. And usually for families, that's values. So hopefully that happens.
Kirby Rosplock
Yeah, that's really helpful. I mean, it's especially helpful because I like the idea that the narrative is weaving together, right? So many different potential viewpoints, maybe around a same time period or a same lived experience, or maybe hearing from different vantage points, a difficult situation, a loss, overcoming something, living through the sale of a business or some other major milestone. Tell me a little bit more about this idea of resilience. I'm just curious how you found this element in the narrative piece with families, and what does that mean?
Jamie Yuenger
Well, I just want to echo back to you how important it is, as you were just saying earlier, that there are different vantage points and different perspectives. When we're talking about a narrative, we don't mean that it's cohesive in the sense that everyone agrees, but rather that there are many different points of view, and they don't have to necessarily all agree or line up. We know that that's not true of ourselves or even our spouse. But taken as a whole, they have a certain meaning. That's actually one of the fun things in filmmaking is that you can have four or five people recount the same moment in time and hear slightly different versions or sometimes wildly different versions of the story. But hopefully there's a nugget, a through line there. But to speak to resilience narratives, which is something... I, and our teams, have been working for a long time in the way that we draw out stories from families and help them identify their key stories, and then to tell them on camera or on a microphone. We have quite naturally leaned into certain elements of storytelling that we have always felt that were important.
Jamie Yuenger
What was really interesting to me is within the last year or two, I've learned about this social research that's been done by a social scientist named Robin Fivish. She's out of Emory University. Her robust work, along with some of her colleagues, has pointed to, and they've been able to, in a scientific way, show that there's three interlocking elements of powerful, empowering family stories. I've really looked at those pieces and realized, wow, these three pieces that she was able to tease out, these are the things that we've been doing all along. But now there's research that shows that this is indeed, these are the key elements that must really be included in storytelling for it to be empowering and to result in greater well-being and resilience. I would add as a part of this in the way I I term it, the resilience narrative of a family. The fourth is documentation. Because although all of those pieces of storytelling are important, in this day and age, if we want to pass those things on, then we need to document it in some form or another. So just to really briefly outline what these are, and I've written about it in an article, so we can link to some of those pieces and people can read more deeply into it.
Jamie Yuenger
But the three that Robin Fivish points out is emotional truth is one of them. So the sense is that when we talk about an event or our lives, we have to be honest. We can't just look at it with rose-colored glasses and/or the opposite, which is just tell how horrible things were, to really share the bandwidth of emotion that happened in that time. The reason that that's important is because if we're trying to connect with the of our family, with the audience, so to speak, then they have to believe us. If it's just one note wonder, then it doesn't resonate, it doesn't stick, and it doesn't feel true, and it doesn't stay, and it doesn't make the impact that you want. That's one. The other one that's pretty easy is coherence. But people also falter on this one. This is looking at the timetable of events. If we're talking about, if we're telling a 100-year family story, for example, and then we skip over the 20 years when we almost went bankrupt, and then we just land in the 1990s, everybody's like, Wait, what happened between 1962 and 1985? In order to make sense of things, not just younger people in our families, but as we all know, in order to get it, we have to know how we got here through the steps.
Jamie Yuenger
We cannot leave out major things that leave people scratching their heads. The other one that sometimes people trip up on is positive meaning making when we tell stories, when we intentionally tell and craft stories for our families. That is not that it was positive. Maybe we went through an incredibly difficult time. Maybe our first marriage was awful, or maybe we went through this horrible lawsuit with another branch of our family, and we are completely out of contact with them, or all sorts of things. A family that we worked with, the Sugaharas, their family is originally from Japan. When they came to California, right post-World War II, their family was put in internment camps, and they lost everything. They lost all of their belongings besides what they could carry with their suitcase. They also agreed with their neighbors that they would sell quite a lot of land for a dollar and that their neighbors sell it back to them after they came back from the camps. Their neighbors didn't do that. So they basically started with nothing, again. So it's not that the things that happened were positive. It's that we create a positive meaning and take away from it.
Jamie Yuenger
And again, going back to emotional truth, it doesn't mean that we didn't feel that it was unfair or that we didn't have a resentment or sorrow about those things, but rather that ultimately, if you look at the Tsukohara as an example, they say, Well, ultimately, though, things worked out for the best because we decided to leave California, where it was very densely Japanese-American population, and go to the East Coast, where we could make a name for ourselves and start afresh. And so the way that they created a frame for themselves was positive. Those three things, and then I would add the fourth is documentation that allows you to pass that story on. That creates the resilience narrative for your family.
Kirby Rosplock
Well, that is incredible. It reminds me there's a piece of positive psychology and a derivative called appreciative inquiry that is strikingly synergistic. To this work. I would love to explore with you offline about that deeper.
Jamie Yuenger
Sure. I would love to as well.
Kirby Rosplock
Yeah. I think there's a lot that is synergistic with that thinking because appreciative inquiry has a lot to do with storytelling and the power of storytelling and shifting the narrative. I see this resilience narrative as being a lot about how we not... It's not that we discredit the pain or that we discount it, or that we bury it, but we actually learn from it, and we own it. And we say, well, we can't change it, but we can certainly say, where do we go from here? And we know that so many families, so many individuals have gone through a major struggle to find greatness or to be where they are today. And that's part of the journey. That is part of the incredibleness of the narrative that we can't discount, and we don't want to lose. That's the fidelity. That's the important meat. So I see it as part of, sometimes Sometimes what gets lost in the now is that we didn't live that. We didn't see that awful issue that happened post-World War II and what happened in California for that poor family. That now family did not know what it was like to be treated awfully and outcasted.
Kirby Rosplock
Tell us more, what other kinds of stories have you witnessed where this resilience narrative just is so impactful.
Jamie Yuenger
Yeah. Well, I think there's an incredible family. I won't name them, but we worked with them. They had done a lot of work around creating a family charter and outlining their... I think there were nine family values that they delineated, and they wanted to bring those to life in some way. It was, it's really interesting working with them and looking at those and basically tying stories from their own family to those values so that they wouldn't just have it on a piece of paper that these are the values, and they wouldn't just talk about them in general terms or I don't know, I have a bullet point list, but that they could bring it to life through the history and the stories of their family. They had a horrible tragedy with one of their sons, and he became quadriplegic. It was really interesting looking at how they connected one of their family values to that story. Of course, everybody in the family, all of the sons of that family, and eventually their wives, relate to that story. It's a seminal story of their family's resilience. It's only a five-minute piece, they decided to make, they made a full family documentary film, and then they made a series of five out of the nine family values. They made clips about those. They're three to five minutes each, but they've taken those videos and they play them at family meetings.
Jamie Yuenger
They've also played them when family members have had disputes to use it as a conversation starter. They've used it to onboard new family members and also staff so that they have a sense of this history. It's one thing to come on as a family office person or a new family member and hear tidbits of those stories. It's another thing to really see a full version of this monumental moment in this family's life when they were really tested. This person almost died. Then to see, wait, what happened actually is that the woman who was dating this guy who was becoming quadriplegic, she got married to him in the hospital. In the hospital. The whole family was there, and they have photographs of that. You hear multiple voices telling that story. The matriarch of the family says, I would never, ever, ever wish that event upon any other family nor my own. But it actually was the event that brought everyone together, and it keeps us together in a sense. To be able to crystallize that through the telling, you can just feel how powerful that is to be able to use it as a touchstone going forward when life We all can, we lose our minds and become just out of sorts and then being reminded of actually what matters and who we are and who we want to be.
Kirby Rosplock
Yeah. So I'm hearing you say how powerful maybe some of these artifacts, like these stories, can become these really important family artifacts or assets that become grounding points, right? So we move forward. Maybe we go our own ways. Maybe we're not all totally tight or connected, but then you're bringing people back together. This can be a way to keep people connected, even if we're taking our family vacations. We didn't have the family reunion this year. Maybe we didn't have the family meeting which brought us all together. So maybe these resilience narrative keeps propelling us together, even though we might still be doing our own thing.
Jamie Yuenger
And I think what's really powerful about it is that the point isn't that this becomes this, oh, my gosh, we've heard this story a million times, this refrain, but rather that it is a point of inspiration of this is the family that we are. It doesn't even have to be collectively because there's the wonderful black sheep of families. It's like just knowing that story for yourself as an individual is thinking, okay, wait, my grandfather immigrated from... I just had an interview with a gentleman recently. He immigrated from the UK, from Ireland to the United States, then to the UK. He himself has immigrated from England to America. He's like, wait a second. This actually is in my bones, in my blood, moving around this wanderlust. That's the information that his sons then can take and integrate and say, Oh, this is so interesting. Going off and exploring the world isn't so foreign of an idea. This is part of who I am. And that theme, whatever the theme might be, is there for everybody, either to work collectively as a family or just as an individual, to make sense of yourself and your disposition, your hopes, your dreams, and your challenges.
Kirby Rosplock
So Jamie, I'm going to bring it back to the actionable side of this.
Jamie Yuenger
A couple of things.
Kirby Rosplock
One, I know in my family, I've tried a couple of times to get my mother and other elders in family to, Would you do this? Come on, what do you think? First off, how do we get family members to buy into this or think this is worthwhile to do? One, and then how many times you have family say, Oh, but we're not that interesting. We don't really have that interesting of a narrative. We shouldn't be doing this. That's for this really big, important family. We are just an average family.
Jamie Yuenger
Yeah. There's at least two questions in there. Let me start with the one about your mom and trying to get her story recorded. This is a really interesting and ongoing challenge that people have. I was inspired by this issue recently enough, I don't know how many, a few months ago now, to write a short piece called What to Tell Mom and Dad, something like capturing our elders' stories, I think, something like that. So what to Tell Mom and Dad. The thing that I think is key, probably the most important thing is to realize is that we often approach our mom or dad or other elders, grandparents, and we make it about them, that they are interesting or that their stories are interesting. I know that that makes sense in a certain way, but actually, I strongly believe that the thing that needs to be said is, this is important to me. This is a gift that I would like you to give to me, and here's why. This is a gift that I would really, really appreciate you giving to my children, and this is why. These are my concerns. This is what I worry about this because this is your parent or your grandparent, and their relationship with you, even if you're a full-fledged grown up, is care.
Jamie Yuenger
And so what they care about is your well-being let's hope. And what they care about is your children's well-being, let's hope. So the driver here is taking the focus off of them being the starlet and actually being of service. Because their natural role, our natural role, all of us as we grow older and we become an elder, is to be that wise, guiding person. If we have matured, hopefully as an adult, that is the role that we're playing in our '70s, '80s, '90s. It's appropriate, and that's what we need to be asking of them. We need to think for ourselves, why is this important to me? What problem is this solving? Or what joy or beauty or value is this bringing into my life and my children's life? And to articulate that as an ask. I think it really changes things because people, frequently enough, will come to StoryKeep and they want to gift what we do as a gift to their parents. It's funny because actually the gift is for you. There is a gift, yes, in reflecting on your life and having the honor of sitting and doing this and having... Looking good on camera, of course, all of that.
Jamie Yuenger
But I think the gift, first and foremost, is the gift that they're giving to us as the storyteller. I think it feels, because I think most of the time it is, much more honest. Then you're really talking and you're really connecting with your parent. That's interesting. Then you can get to the question of they say, Yeah, but I'm nervous about the way that my... I don't like the way my voice sounds, those kinds of things. Then you're moving further along in the conversation, and you can talk about some of these practicalities and things like that. But you really need to make an ask for what you want. I think maybe if you do that, Kirby, with your mom, I'll send you the thing. Maybe if you look at what I've written through, it could change the conversation.
Kirby Rosplock
Yeah. Well, I'll give it. I've done it.. I have several asks. I have some other ideas of the approach, but I appreciate your feedback. And my second question was the one that I get more frequently, which is families say, oh, but we're not that interesting. We have nothing really to share.
Jamie Yuenger
Yeah. I think the question is that it's not necessarily about it having to be super interesting, because we're not here to be making a blockbust or film. We're here to pass on a sense of identity and values and meaning and love. I think even if you're an elder of the family, you are also talking about the people who came before you. There's a sense of acknowledgement and honoring that's happening. That is whether or not your mother founded a Fortune 500 company or she made pies like my grandmother. My grandmother made a pie every day as a farmer wife in South Dakota. I mean, talk about perseverance. It's not really about what happened in the storyline of greatness, let's say. It's really what we're extracting from it and giving an opportunity to honor that. I think that that is The thing is the driving force is connection and cohesion, gratitude, honor. And the stories are in service of that, as opposed to it being about the stories.
Kirby Rosplock
And if you would say there's one or two things to get them inspired to say, oh, we should do this. I get it now. Or what have been some of the hooks that you've seen that maybe are that flip the switch, that get people to come to the other side and say, yeah, we're going to do this. We're going to make this actionable. We're going to do this. Can you give us some ideas? Yeah.
Jamie Yuengerr
Yeah, I think, well, one is metaphorical, and one is very bare-bone practical. The first is a phrase that keeps ringing in my head, which is, 'Don't miss the boat'. So many people wait for a perfect moment, for the milestone, 80th birthday or whatever they're thinking. And really, the best time is now. Because after this moment, people are older. After this moment, anything else can happen. After this moment, we can get a diagnosis of dementia. Now is the time. A lot of people miss the boat because they're waiting for a more perfect moment. And that's actually the thing. There's no more perfect moment than now, truly. So I think that is the thing to really get. And it takes some level of maturity to take that in, but that's one. I think the other takeaway is the practical element, which is that depending on who you... If you're doing it on your own, some documentation, or you're hiring a third party or professional to do it, is that it doesn't need to be huge. It doesn't need to be comprehensive. It doesn't need to be impressive, per se. Doing something rather than nothing is so valuable.
Jamie Yuenger
When I think for myself, my father, I have one bad audio recording of him talking about something that's not even interesting. I really love to have that one piece, just to have his voice. Had I put in even a little bit more effort in that direction of my own family line, would I be happy about that? Yeah. I think about Okay, have I lived an important, interesting enough life myself? If I had five-minute video of my grandmother in the 1930s, not talking, just making a pie, that's it. It, watching her do it, watching her hand gestures, whoa, that's you, though. That's you later for somebody else. I think doing something small and sometimes doing a private podcasting piece as opposed to a film, that can be a little bit more easy to take in because we don't have to do our hair. That's what I would say. Don't miss the boat and do something rather than nothing.
Kirby Rosplock
Yeah, love Jamie, you've built so much awesome content, and you have lots of potential leave behinds for our listeners and our audio or video people who are watching today. Can you give us some of the resources that are links to this podcast today?
Jamie Yuenger
Sure. There's a piece that I wrote for Crane Currency recently, and I think it's entitled, Your Family's Most Important Asset, It's Resilience Narrative. That's where I outlined it a little bit more detail and also go deeper into the case study of the Sugohara family who was in the Japanese internment camps and use their family's story as an example of a resilience narrative so you can see how it plays out. I've also written about how a family's property, like a residence or a vacation home, can also be a way to get into the family legacy or a family story or narrative so that you take the emphasis off a big comprehensive history or a person and use a space as a way to tell a family's values. And what more? Oh, in this piece that I talked about, what to Tell Mom and Dad. Those are a few, and maybe they'll even be more goodies, detailed and linked.
Kirby Rosplock
Yeah, we'll definitely link to your website and your contact information, because I'm sure the phone will be ringing, your inbox will be full because people should ask now, right? So if you've been putting this off, like maybe I have been, I think it's a great time to get actionable. The summertime is a great time or anytime is a great time to just figure out how to make this happen in your family. Or if you're an advisor, it's a great time to bring this up with your client and say, Hey, have you been putting this off? I think this is a really powerful way to bring families together to talk about some important concepts and content. It's also a great time if you're working on more family governance-related information, that this can dovetail into that. Jamie Yuenger, I'm so appreciative of your time being here on the Tamarind Learning podcast, learning more about StoryKeep and your wonderful firm and your wonderful work. It's just awesome to have you here. So thank you for joining us.
Jamie Yuenger
Well, thanks for being such a beautiful conversation partner.
Kirby Rosplock
It's been fun. You're an awesome guest, so it's easy to do. Thanks.
