History's memory is partial, politically shaped, and unreliable in ways that most of its subjects would not recognize as their story. It remembers the powerful, the dramatic, and the convenient; it forgets the ordinary, the repetitive, and the quietly faithful. Most of what kept the world going — the tending, the teaching, the loving, the raising — leaves no historical record. This does not make it less real or less consequential.
Each step builds on the last.