I wanted to save my family’s stories. Instead, I found a connection I didn’t know I was missing

This First Person column is the experience of Andrew Stetson, a writer and storyteller in P.E.I. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

It was supposed to be a simple project. A few quick recordings for a family group chat. But what started as an offhand suggestion turned into a multi-year project to create a family podcast — one that changed everything I thought I knew about belonging.

It was days before my grandfather’s funeral in August 2023. My dad and I were packing up my apartment in Ottawa, moving through its now half-empty rooms. The sharp ripping of packing tape and the quiet shuffle of sock feet filled that uncomfortably heavy silence, a tension of grief left unspoken between us.

I was standing on my bed, peeling a large paper map from the nearby concrete wall when his voice broke the hush: “What do you think of recording some of Mum’s stories while we still can?”

I didn’t really know what to think. 

I had just turned 25 and even though storytelling had shaped so much of my life — from working in Island museums to earning my journalism degree — I found myself wondering, “Is there even anything worth recording?”

I had no idea how wrong I was.

I wasn't the only one who was reluctant at first. It took nearly two years before my grandmother Hazel, who turned 93 in 2025, finally agreed.

“Oh, I don’t have anything to share,” she’d say. “There’s not much to be told.”

Eventually, we gathered a few relatives, a list of questions and hit record.

Listening back now, I can hear her nerves — short, careful answers, the quiet hesitation of someone searching for just the right words. In those nervous pauses, that old country kitchen boomed with the hum of tired appliances and the clang of the grandfather clock.

But with each question, the nerves began to fade. 

Slowly, her childhood came into focus — life at the Scales Hydro Electric Plant in South Freetown, P.E.I., where she was born and raised, and where her father, John Heffel, helped transform an 1800s grist mill into a power plant that serviced the nearby communities. That’s where my family’s story — and with it, a little piece of Island history — began.

One interview became two, then four, and this little project grew beyond anything we’d planned. We spoke with relative after relative, each voice carrying a lifetime of shared laughter and loss.