My mother never thought of herself as an archivest, record keeper or custodian of family history. But she was all of those and much more.

She left us her family Bible, half a dozen photo albums, her Christmas card list and personal address book.

The albums contain photos of her and her surviving sister Renee. There are none of her older sister Helen who died tragically at age 3. Or Renee’s twin brother who died shortly after their birth.

My grandparents never talked about the deaths of Helen, Baby Brother or my grandmother’s 4 miscarriages. Bringing children into the world in those days was a miracle.

If my mother, the custodian of our family history had not shared all this with her children, we would never have known.

THE PHOTO ALBUMS contain photos of her parents, a few of my father’s parents, my mother and father on their wedding day, at family reunions and other events and my sister and I when we were darling children, destined for old age and wrinkles.

I found one of my mother’s address books quite by chance the other day. It was a reminder of her friends and our relatives. Almost everyone in it has gone to glory.

My wife and I treasure old photo albums compiled by our parents and ones we kept ourselves as our children grew up,

I THOUGHT we had disposed of my mother’s address books and other such items after her death almost 20 years ago. But there it was, a little black spiral bound book with pages of names and addresses.

It was written in her careful cursive hand, a reminder of the names of people she cherished and frequently corresponded with.

Her letters were thoughtful, handwritten letters, not today’s faster, frantic emails.

Wasn’t technology supposed to make our lives easier? Or has it instead just made us more time and deadline driven?

Letter writing is an almost unknown and neglected art today. We have email. texting and other electronic marvels we may not even be able to name.

My in-box, perhaps like yours, is filled overnight with dozens of offers from people I never heard of trying to sell me something I neither need nor want.

I send them to the spam folder. When I clean it out each week it will contain more than a thousand spammed emails.

MY MOTHER’S family Bible is a treasure trove of family history. In the front pages, it contains pages of her notes on births, marriages, children and deaths. It maps the eternal cycle of lives in our family.

Many of the names in it are familiar even if they were dead before I was born.

My wife has treasures of her own, among them copies of her father’s flight logs as a fighter pilot in World War II and Vietnam.

When we were in Ukraine, we discovered at the Poltava Air Museum photos of the crews of US bombers and fighters who landed there after bombing Berlin.

We knew her father had flown fighter cover on those bombing raids. But this was the 1st time we found out where he had landed and refueled for the long return journey to their airfields in the British isles.

WHAT WE GET from family lore is a sense of who we are and where we came from.

I hope yours left you such treasures.

Next: What did it cost?

An offer for you

Jerry Bellune’s new $9.99 digital book, “The Art of Compelling Writing,” is available now at Amazon.com. Chronicle readers can get a copy for $4.99 by emailing him at JerryBellune@yahoo.com