Grandparents: The Original Influencers

Before TikTok, before Instagram, before YouTube tutorials—there were grandparents. They weren’t out there chasing followers, but let’s be honest: they’ve been influencing us all along.

Think about it. That recipe you still use for lemon meringue pie? Probably from Grandma. The work ethic your parents drilled into you? Grandpa’s fingerprints are all over it. Even the way your family tells stories—loud, funny, dramatic, or tender—likely traces back to them. They set the tone without ever trying. Our family’s pretty heavily Italian, so a good conversation gives you your day’s arm workout.

Our grandparents often carry entire worlds inside their memories. They’ve lived through wars, cultural revolutions, and personal triumphs we can hardly imagine because, for better or worse, they lived in an entirely different world in time. But here’s the catch…their generation doesn’t infodump or aura farm or really even talk about their lives unless someone asks, and, even then, their generational humility might make them balk. Their lives obviously have and had value, so their stories do, too. And those stories tend to stay tucked away, at the risk of disappearing altogether, unless we act.

That’s where legacy videos come in. They aren’t just “interviews on camera.” They’re a chance to broaden your understanding of the people who shape your family. Their voice, their laugh, the way they squint when they’re trying to recall a date. You may not be old enough yet that you've taken stock of your mortality, but they likely have, and I’d be shocked if they didn’t want a little piece of themselves to last forever. This piece, the legacy video, doesn’t break on moving day. Siblings don’t have to fight over who inherits it. It doesn’t rely on your memory of the in-passing version of a story you heard twenty years ago. It’s their words, their reflections, unchanging but somehow meaning something different or more each time you view them.

Here’s a question: wouldn’t it be incredible if your kids—or your kids’ kids—could really “meet” your grandparents even after they’re gone? To hear their advice, their humor, their perspective on life? That’s influence that lasts longer than any social media trend ever could.