Most family stories are passed down orally, from grandparent to grandchild and from parent to child. Over time the details of these stories can get fuzzy or forgotten all together.

To help combat that, Al Caron enlisted Honor Society students from Old Rochester Regional High School to sit and talk with some of the residents at Sippican Health Center to create memoirs for the residents’ families.

The idea for the program came to Caron after he took a memoir writing course at the Elizabeth Taber Library a few years ago. A former English teacher in New Bedford, Caron had always emphasized writing in his classes, and he saw the value in writing down his life stories for his family.

After he started working on his own memoir for his grandchildren, he decided to bring the program to ORR and the Sippican Health Center. This is the program's second year, and he couldn’t be happier with how it’s gone.

“I’ve been thrilled with the response,” he said. “It’s giving back. I really enjoy this.”

The students, Eli and Jacob Spevack, Kelly Fox, Colleen Garcia, Brooke Santos and Noah Tavares, met with residents Dr. Warren Blake, Frances Dellavalle and Roger Bergeron three times, for an hour each.

Each week, the focus was on a different stage of life. First they talked about childhood, then about young adulthood and finally about the residents’ senior years. The students were also prompted by Caron to ask about specific things such as holiday traditions.

“This provides residents an outlet to talk about the lives that they’ve lived,” Caron said.

For Dr. Blake, talking to the students gave him an opportunity to talk about what he spends a lot of time thinking about anyway – the past.

“When you get to this age, you do that anyway,” he said. “You dwell in the past because I know my future.”

He also acknowledges that sharing his experiences is a chance for the students to learn about older generations.

“It’s good to share your memories with younger people,” he said. “It’s good to teach people.”

For Dellavalle, talking to the students has allowed her to remember things she hadn’t thought about in years.

“I’ve had two things in my life that I remembered after talking to them,” she said. “It’s been nice to remember some of that stuff.”

She was also impressed with the students themselves, and looks forward to seeing them again when they bring her a hard copy of the memoir.

“They’re very intelligent, very nice young people,” she said. “They’re very kind and very considerate. I’ll be excited to get [the memoir] and share it with my family.”

The students enjoyed speaking with the residents just as much and said one of the highlights was getting to hear history from a personal point of view.

“It’s weird for us because we learn about history in a textbook, but then we talk to the residents and these things really happened to them,” Garcia said.

They were also struck by the difference they could see in the lives they live, compared to the lives of the residents.

“It’s cool to see how different their lives were when they were at this age,” Eli Spevack said.

Hearing the full life stories of the residents also allowed the students to pinpoint what decisions shaped the residents’ lives.

“It was so interesting to hear the things that caused them to do something big in their lives, things that we can now see have impacted their lives in the long run,” Eli Spevack said.

Ultimately, the project was not only rewarding for the students, but it also gave them inspiration to try this with their own families.

“I want to do this for my grandpa who founded a school in New Bedford because none of that is written down,” Tavares said. “It would let me document memories that may be individual but that touch the hearts of many.”