My mom nurtured my love of family history at the breakfast table when I was a preschooler. Over cinnamon toast and Cream of Wheat, she'd tell me stories of her childhood during the Great Depression in the 1930s. When my grandfather was furloughed from the Newport News shipyard, the family, for a time, went to live with my great-grandparents in rural Whaleyville. My imagination was ignited by Mom's memories of picking wildflowers, fleeing angry chickens, and eating soda crackers with her grandfather on the front steps of the tiny gas station he managed. The rural setting of her idyllic memories seemed a million miles from the working-class suburb in which we then lived.

Sitting on my maternal grandparents' front porch in the evenings, I would listen as the family swapped yarns. My grandparents were from "the country"-meaning rural North Carolina: Grandpop from Edenton and Grandma from Sunbury. Grandpop's family, the Nixons, had lived in that area since the early 1700s, so plenty of family lore got passed down. Grandpop's stories featured an epic-sized cast of characters. None were referred to by their full names or as Mister or Missus. Instead, they were "Old Man" or "Old Lady" So-and-so.

Grandpop's tales were often outlandish. Once, some men in the family uncovered pirate's treasure in a boggy piece of land, but under its own weight, the treasure chest kept sinking out of their grasp, finally disappearing forever into the muck. Another time a cousin survived a tornado by lying on the ground as the funnel cloud passed inches over his head. I have no idea if these stories were fact or myth, but Grandpop believed them; they were a part of who he was. Years later, when studying genealogy in college and researching the Nixon branch of my family tree, I was shocked to discover that many of the family members Grandpop often talked about had lived generations before he was born. And yet they had been as real to him and his sense of self as his parents and siblings.

Grandma always took Grandpop's stories with a heaping dose of salt. "His people were different from my people," she'd say. Grandma also insisted that she and Grandpop, like their respective "people," had different accents. The differences escaped me: even after studying dialects in college acting classes, they each sounded similarly "Country" to me.

My grandparents' talk of their "people" always stuck with me. In a world where so many feel disconnected from others, the feeling of having a "people" seems salvific as far as one's individuality is concerned. We are each unlike anyone who has ever been or will be born. Ironically, our distinctiveness, our very being, is the result of the choices and actions of our ancestors-stretching back into the mist of prehistory. In a sense, we are each a "people," and, as the old song says, "people need people"-whether they are the families into which we're born or the families we chose.

Rob Lauer is an award-winning, nationally-produced and published playwright with over 35 years of experience in the entertainment industry. His national credits include production work for MGA Films, Time/Warner TV, The Learning Channel and The History Channel. Locally, Rob has been producing, directing and hosting three TV series for PCTV (the City of Portsmouth’s official channel) since 2011.