Facts are important, but stories provide meaning - assuming you have time enough to hear them.

Tucked away in the word history is the word story. Genealogists and others trying to discover our present by studying the past often lose sight of the narrative in a Sergeant Friday-style search for "Just the facts, Ma'am." Names, dates and places are details that a family tree requires, but with just these, the tree may resemble un arbre de Noël in late March: lots of trunk and branches, but few needles to remind us that it was once a living thing.

As my wife and I drove home along Nova Scotia's South Shore from a visit to Tusket, I thought of the contrast between the people we met there and the harassed-looking motorists and shoppers we encounter in the city. Tusket residents were willing to converse, to listen and to share an anecdote. There was, to quote a lovely Irish expression, time enough. Everyday living there involves sharing and giving. People are polite to one another-in part because they share a space with only so many others, and will often cross paths.

Have urbanites lost the sense of community that still lets visitors to towns and villages feel at home?

Thousands of workers and students spend a fortune in nerves, time and fuel commuting to the city each day. Hundreds flee metro every weekend and during their vacations. Where do many of them go? Why, home, of course-to Mabou or Souris, Hillsborough, St. Anthony or beyond.

One result of all this coming and going in the city is that we rarely find ourselves at home in the bosom of our biological and social families. Our rushing about reduces human interaction of the more personal kind, resulting in a sense of detachment from others. People spend so much of their lives inside the shells they build around them that some turn to genealogy in the hopes of connecting to someone or something. They may come to know more about great-grandfather than they do about where their 13-year-old hangs out or with whom… genealogy is great, but don't sacrifice the living to the search.

People who live and work in Tusket, and a legion of similar places, are already home. Folks have time to connect as a community when there are fewer distractions, and when they are among those they know. When I meet people in places like Tusket, many times we form an easy connection within minutes. I may be from away, and they may be displaying their "company face," but visitors who come with an open mind and a story or two to share are on their way to making friends.

As we drove along we stopped on the way, in one instance gathering broom (genista) on the roadside to use in making a whisk. The plants didn't just happen to be there; they are the epitaph for a vanished nursery. We found a sand dollar on Rissers Beach-a shell the size and shape of an old dollar coin. Further along we came upon a shoreline littered with thousands of unusual black stones. Is it soapstone? Serpentine? Serpenitite? It can be carved, sawed and drilled without breaking. We'll have to find out what it is. What will its story be? What can we make out of it?

On the LaHave ferry we pointed out Riverport to a woman from Massachusetts… "and there to the right is Five Houses. Well, there's a reason we call it that…" The family history of the Oxners, Reinhardts and others takes on a new currency as we speak.

All the while, in a box on the back seat of our car sits a bowl made from a burl, a hard knot of wood from an old tree. Who made this thing of beauty, shaping and polishing it with care into a masterpiece? What tales could that tree tell us?

People have a history, but everything has a story. In smaller places someone knows those stories and can tell them.

Let's hope the genealogist has time enough to listen to the stories in his or her family history.

Dr. Terrence M. Punch is the author of the newly released book, Erin's Sons: Irish Arrivals in Atlantic Canada 1761-1858 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2008).