YOUR GRANDFATHER HAD STORIES YOU'LL NEVER HEAR

Most men assume their stories are ordinary.

We live them every day, so why wouldn't they feel that way? The jobs we've had, the places we've lived, the people we've met, the mistakes we've made and the experiences that changed us eventually become part of the background of our lives.

But something strange happens when those stories belong to someone who is no longer here. The ordinary details can become the things we most wish we knew.

You start wondering what your grandfather was like before he was your grandfather. What did he want when he was 20? What frightened him? What did he struggle with? Who influenced him? Which decisions changed the direction of his life? What did he think about when nobody else was around?

Most families inherit photographs, possessions, names and fragments of stories from the generations that came before them. Very few inherit a record of what those people actually thought and experienced.

For a long time, I thought much of my grandfather's story had disappeared with him.

Then, around 20 years after he died, I discovered that he had left more behind than I realised.

THE GRANDFATHER I REMEMBER

My grandfather passed away when I was about 15.

I have memories of him, but they're the memories of a child. I knew him as my grandfather because that was the version of him I experienced, and at that age I never really stopped to think about the person he had been before he became Grandad.

I knew pieces of the life that had come before me. I knew that when he was a young, newly married man, he left Europe and came to Australia on his own hoping to build a better life. I knew he worked on a farm and that eventually the life he established here became part of the foundation our family inherited.

At 15, those things were simply facts in a family story. I didn't yet have enough experience of my own to understand the human reality behind them.

It wasn't until I became older that I started thinking about what his story actually meant. He had recently married and then left the person he loved behind to travel to the other side of the world alone. He arrived in an unfamiliar country and took on physically demanding work while trying to establish a future.

We take our ability to remain connected for granted today. We can call someone on the other side of the world and see their face instantly, send photographs in seconds and exchange messages throughout the day. If circumstances allow, we can get on a plane and cross the world in less than a day.

That wasn't the world my grandfather entered.

There must have been isolation and difficult days on the farm. There must have been moments when Australia felt incredibly far from home and when the better life he was trying to build still seemed a long way away.

As I became an adult, questions started occurring to me that had never occurred to the 15-year-old version of myself. I wondered whether he had been lonely, what he thought when he first arrived in Australia, what he missed most about home and whether there were moments when he considered giving up and returning to Europe.

I wondered what kept him going and what kind of future he imagined he was building.

By the time I knew enough about life to understand why those questions mattered, I couldn't ask him anymore.

For years, I assumed that was simply how family history worked. Eventually the people disappear, and then the details of their lives slowly disappear with them.

I was wrong.

TWENTY YEARS LATER, I FOUND HIS JOURNALS

Around 20 years after my grandfather died, my grandmother passed away and my dad and I had the difficult job of cleaning out their home.

Anyone who has ever done that knows how unusual the experience can be. A house you've known for years suddenly becomes a collection of memories. You find photographs you haven't seen since childhood, objects you'd forgotten existed and ordinary possessions that take on a different meaning because you know the person who owned them is gone.

Among my grandparents' belongings, I found something I had never known existed: my grandfather's notebooks and journals.

There were heaps of them, and I had no idea he had written so much.

Inside were photographs, stories, memories and pieces of his life that I had never seen before. These weren't second-hand stories somebody else remembered him telling. They were his own words, written in his own handwriting.

As I started reading, I found myself learning something new about someone I had thought I already knew.

I was discovering a side of my grandfather that the child in me had never understood. There were stories I hadn't heard and parts of his life I hadn't known existed. For almost two decades, I had assumed the opportunity to know those things had disappeared with him.

Yet there I was, sitting with his words in front of me.

I couldn't ask him a new question and hear his answer, but through those pages I could hear something of his voice again. I could see what he had considered important enough to write down, the photographs he had chosen to keep and the experiences he wanted to record.

In a strange way, it felt like being given another opportunity to have a conversation with someone who had been gone for 20 years.

That experience changed the way I thought about journaling.

WE DOCUMENT EVERYTHING, BUT WHAT ARE WE ACTUALLY PRESERVING?

Our generation probably documents more of everyday life than any generation before us.

Most of us have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of photographs on our phones. We send messages constantly, record videos, share moments on social media and store enormous parts of our lives across devices and cloud accounts.

There is more evidence that we existed than ever before, but I'm not sure that means future generations will necessarily know us better.

A photograph can show my children where I went, while a social media post can show what I chose to share. A family tree might tell them names, dates and relationships. None of those things necessarily tells them what I was thinking or how the experiences of my life actually felt.

That was what struck me about finding my grandfather's journals.

There was something different about holding physical pages he had once held and seeing words written in his handwriting. The photographs inside weren't one image among thousands sitting in a camera roll. They were photographs he had deliberately chosen to keep beside particular memories.

The journals contained something a collection of photographs couldn't provide: his perspective.

A photograph might show my grandfather working on a farm in Australia, but his writing could help me understand what being there meant to him. A document could tell me when he arrived in Australia, while his own words could tell me something about the man who arrived.

That's a very different inheritance.

THE STORIES THAT DISAPPEAR BETWEEN GENERATIONS

I've always wanted to build a family tree because there is something grounding about understanding where you came from. I've also realised, though, how quickly that knowledge becomes difficult to recover.

Every generation takes some information with it. Someone remembers the name of a town until eventually nobody does. A photograph survives, but nobody can identify everyone standing in it. A family story gets repeated for decades until nobody is completely certain which details are accurate.

Eventually, a life that once contained thousands of days, relationships, decisions and experiences can be reduced to little more than a name, a date of birth, a place and an occupation.

Those details matter, but they don't tell you who somebody was.

A family tree can tell my children their great-grandfather's name and where he came from. His journals can tell them who he was.

That distinction has stayed with me.

When we talk about leaving a legacy, we often think about the tangible things someone leaves behind, such as property, money, jewellery, photographs or possessions that acquire sentimental value because of who owned them.

But some of the most valuable things a person accumulates can't be placed into a will. They are the experiences that changed their perspective, the mistakes that taught them something, the stories they carried, the beliefs that evolved over time and the lessons they eventually understood about life.

If none of those things are recorded, they depend entirely on somebody remembering them.

And memory is fragile.

YOUR STORY DOESN'T NEED TO BE EXTRAORDINARY TO MATTER

One of the reasons men don't write about their lives is that many don't believe there is anything worth recording.

They haven't crossed an ocean alone, built an empire, fought in a war or done anything they imagine belongs in a memoir.

But that's applying the wrong standard.

Your family doesn't need you to have lived an extraordinary life for your story to matter to them.

Think about what you would want to know about your own father or grandfather. It probably isn't limited to their greatest achievements.

You might want to know what their first job was like, how they met the person they loved, what they did with their friends when they were 18, what worried them when they became a father, or what they thought success meant when they were young.

You might want to know about the biggest mistake they made, the trip they still remembered decades later, the period when money was tight or something they believed for years before experience changed their mind.

These are ordinary parts of an ordinary life, but ordinary doesn't mean meaningless.

Even stories that feel insignificant today can become valuable when the person who lived them is no longer available to tell them.

That's something my grandfather's journals taught me.

He probably didn't sit down to write believing his grandson would one day find those notebooks and read them decades later. He simply recorded pieces of his life.

Years later, those pages meant something entirely different to the person holding them.

WRITING ISN'T ONLY ABOUT THE FUTURE

There is another reason to write things down, and it has nothing to do with what happens to your journal decades from now.

Writing can help us understand the life we're living today.

Thoughts behave differently when they remain in our heads. They can be vague, repeat themselves and disappear before we've properly examined them. Putting an experience into words forces us to slow down long enough to look at it more carefully.

We can begin to recognise patterns, reconsider assumptions and sometimes understand why a particular experience affected us more than we realised at the time.

That's why journaling can be about both reflection and preservation.

You might write something today because you're trying to understand it for yourself. Years later, somebody you love might read those same words and understand you better because of them.

If you're new to journaling or unsure how to begin, our Guide to Journaling for Men explores different approaches to the practice and how to make reflection part of your life.

You don't need to consider yourself a writer, and your journal doesn't need beautiful prose, perfect grammar or profound observations. The value comes from recording something honestly enough that it still means something when you return to it later.

WHAT WOULD YOU WANT THEM TO KNOW?

Imagine someone in your family finds one of your notebooks 50 years from now.

Maybe it's your son or daughter, a grandchild who knew you well, or a great-grandchild you never had the opportunity to meet.

They open it and find your handwriting.

What would you want them to discover?

Perhaps you'd tell them about the family you grew up in, what your parents were like or what you remember about your grandparents. Maybe you'd write about becoming a father, a relationship that changed you, a failure that hurt at the time but eventually redirected your life, or something you believed when you were younger that experience later taught you was wrong.

You might write about a place you loved, a ridiculous night with friends, the first car you bought or a period of your life that nobody else knew was difficult.

Not every page needs to contain a profound piece of wisdom. Sometimes the story itself is enough because one day somebody might be trying to understand where they came from, and the most valuable thing you can give them isn't another name or date. It's context.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO WRITE YOUR MEMOIRS

The idea of recording your life can sound overwhelming.

Where do you begin? Do you start with childhood, your parents, school, relationships, work, fatherhood, mistakes, achievements or the things you've never really spoken about?

Faced with a blank page and an entire lifetime, most people understandably never begin.

That's one of the reasons we created The Journal by Memoirs By Him.

It contains more than 220 prompts across different areas of a man's life, giving you somewhere to begin without asking you to sit down and write your autobiography from beginning to end.

One question might bring back a childhood memory you haven't thought about for 30 years. Another might make you reconsider an experience you've always understood in one particular way. Another might simply preserve a funny story your children have heard dozens of times but would otherwise have to rely on memory to retell.

You don't need to answer everything at once. You might write a page today and another next week, allowing the record to build naturally over time.

Eventually, those answers become something larger than individual journal entries. Together, they become a record of a person and the life they experienced.

THE CONVERSATION THAT CAN CONTINUE AFTER YOU'RE GONE

My grandfather never knew I would find his journals.

He couldn't have known that around 20 years after he died, I would sit down and begin reading them. He couldn't have known that there would be questions I wished I had asked when I was younger, or that his notebooks would answer some of them before I even knew I wanted the answers.

He also couldn't have known that seeing his handwriting again and discovering stories I had never heard would make me feel connected to him in a way I hadn't expected.

But that's exactly what happened.

As a child, I knew my grandfather. Through his journals, I began to know more about the man he had been before I was there.

That's why I no longer think of journaling simply as writing about your day. Sometimes you're writing for yourself because you're trying to understand where you've been or where you're going. At other times, without even knowing it, you may be leaving behind a conversation for someone who won't know the questions they want to ask until years from now.

Most possessions eventually lose their value.

Our stories can do the opposite. The longer someone has been gone, the more valuable their own words can become.