The Things We Think We Want
June has been a month of unexpected clarity.
Lately, I've spent a lot of time thinking about transitions. Some of those thoughts have been practical while other thoughts have been more personal, centered around Legacy Lore: True Crime + Ancestral Secrets and what I hope this project becomes.
Like many people, I started by focusing on numbers:
More listeners
More downloads
More followers
A bigger audience
That's what success is supposed to look like, isn't it?
But the deeper I dug into that idea, the more I realized I was chasing the wrong thing. Because what I actually want isn't a large audience.
I want an engaged audience with people who ask questions. I want people who challenge assumptions and notice details hidden in historical records and wonder what they mean. I want people willing to sit with uncertainty and help uncover the truth together.
The realization became especially clear after attending the National Genealogical Society Conference in Fort Wayne.
While there, I had the opportunity to meet listeners, researchers, and storytellers from across the country. Conversations that started with a family name often turned into discussions about court records, social history, forgotten lives, and the responsibility we have as researchers to tell those stories thoughtfully.
Not long after the conference, the podcast was featured in a conference recap by genealogist and writer James M. Beidler in the Altoona Mirror. While I was honored by the recognition, what stayed with me most wasn't the attention itself. It was the reminder of why I started this work in the first place
I started it because I kept finding people in historical records who deserved to be remembered.
People reduced to a single line in a court document, whose names survived, but whose stories disappeared. People who lived complicated lives that never made it into the official record.
Storytelling gives those people a voice again. Genealogy tells us what happened but storytelling helps us understand why it mattered.
That belief is shaping the future of Legacy Lore in ways I didn't expect.
The Patreon community, for example, has become less about exclusive content and more about collaboration. Together, we're currently examining a piracy case from 1825, asking questions, comparing sources, and working through the evidence as a group. What began as a membership platform is slowly becoming something much more interesting: a place where history is explored collectively. (Take a listen HERE for free)
And maybe that's the lesson I've been learning in other areas of life as well. Sometimes we make things harder than they need to be.
We chase bigger when what we really want is deeper. We search for more when what we need is connection. We focus on outcomes while overlooking the people already walking beside us.
The stories we uncover matter but so do the people helping us uncover them.
Every family has stories worth preserving. Every community has voices worth remembering. Every record points toward a life that was once lived.
As researchers, storytellers, and family historians, our responsibility isn't simply to collect names and dates. It's to ask better questions. To seek understanding. To preserve memory. And whenever possible, to tell the stories that might otherwise be forgotten.
Thank you for being part of that journey.
The stories are waiting.
And together, we'll keep telling them.
Warm regards,
Sammy Jo
