I think this is a more recent phenomenon of the modern’s. One can look to other ancient societies that still exist in small pockets, and their storytelling is orders of magnitude better than ours. Especially when it involves passing down family history.
You also have to realise that only partial family history can ever be truly handed down, particularly when there are no official records. Look back 6 generations in your family and there are 64 direct ancestors (if you're lucky and there was no inbreeding). There's no way all of those names and personalities get preserved. I went looking for family history in parish records and thought that I found a goldmine. Turns out there are about 5 people with the same name in the relatively sparsely populated town that my great great great grandfather was born in. Maybe some were cousins. Maybe one of them was a first-born son who died in childhood, so the traditional first-born name was recycled. It sounds cold hearted, but that shit happened.
Oh there's a great history of story telling on my father's side of the family. He's 94. There's a solitary photo of him sitting on his great grandfather's knee when he was about 5. He has an astonishing memory (that I'm afraid to actively doubt for a number of reasons, mainly though, he's the oldest person I know and nobody alive could corroborate or deny anything he says). He's recently been on TV, being interviewed about his time as a steam train fireman. An example of the amazing stuff he knows... My mother grew up in a large country house that her family somehow inherited. (Honestly, I have no idea and neither does she - they were broke, like most people, but they were rattling around in this large house, and totally mismanaging the land). It was built by a decendent from a French Knight who landed in Ireland in the 1100s during a conquest. There's next to no information about the family, beyond what you might find in Wikipedia about the Knight, and a few generations of the family before they blended into the population. Still, they retained status (justice of the peace, and owning a large estate) and were definitely wealthier than the locals. But the last of that line was Richard DeVerdon, who only had a daughter, Elizabeth. She died at the age of 18, in the year 1845. I was doing some research on the matter an found a large headstone in an ancient graveyard a few miles from our house. My mother knows next to nothing about her family history, and there are few records from the time. Talking to my father opened up a surprising story from his side of the family. My great great great grandfather was a young boy living high on the hills above the graveyard. His own father was ill in 1845 and could not go out to the end of the field to look down to the graveyard, so he asked his young son to go out and look down at the funeral procession and come back to describe what he saw. It's probably why the boy remembered it so vividly. It was a huge funeral, because the young girl was heiress to the estate. He related it directly to my own father when he was a boy, as they stood in the same field looking down at the graveyard. And my father told it to me simply because I asked if he knew anything about the De Verdon family, and the girl's death. It astounded me that I could barely read her name from a very worn headstone, but he could give me a description of the funeral procession that he got from someone who saw it with his own eyes in 1845.
