Is Being a Story Childish?

By some strange turn of events, I have been accepting requests to research other people's ancestors since last summer. I have written about the simple circumstances here, so I would appreciate it if you could read it.

Upon receiving a request, I read family registers, create family trees, and compile family chronicles (chronologies of the family). I start with basic materials such as history and place-name dictionaries, and then move on to local materials from the areas where they lived. After grasping an outline of the land's characteristics, such as its history, climate, and industries, I search for information connected to the ancestors. It is not rare to find direct information about the ancestors themselves, such as their contributions to the region.

When I am immersed in this kind of work for even a week, the past of that family sometimes floats vividly before my eyes, as if I were watching a movie.
—Around this time in the Meiji era, the whole family migrated to far-off Hokkaido.
—Around this time, they left their hometown in their mid-twenties and started a family business from scratch in this land.
—Their children passed away one after another... they must have endured such hardships.

I do not have any special ability to see things or anything like that. Rather, as with all other research, my creed is to see how much highly reliable information I can accumulate. While it is sometimes necessary to form hypotheses, I always keep in mind not to rush ahead based on speculation.

Even so, these images float up without me knowing. The clients who read the research results might feel the same. No, since even I, a complete stranger, feel something tugging at my heart, I think it must be even more so for their own family members.

It goes without saying that research based on information and grounded in reality is the foundation. On the other hand, it is also true that things that did not sink in at all through a mere list of facts like a chronology—such as 'this event happened in this year'—can resonate directly when presented as a historical narrative.

Originally, isn't the human heart made to crave stories? In the past, this was true for the Tale of the Heike and sekkyo-bushi (sermon ballads), as well as the origin stories of temples and shrines, and joruri...

Is the fact that a flow of events takes on a narrative quality without one realizing it inferior to a collection of numerous facts? Is it childish from the perspective of a materialistic view of history?

Wanting to verify the truth of legends passed down in one's own family, or wanting to unearth buried facts to pass on to the next generation—perhaps such fundamental impulses are at work when starting ancestor research. Because, after all, that is the story of your family before you were born.