Every person has a story. Considering that about 95% of all humans who have ever lived are dead, we can conclude that the vast majority of stories have been lost to time. Only relatively recently have inventions such as writing allowed people’s stories to live on past death.

It is with these developments that people began to truly memorialise the dead, armed with the tools to ensure their history will live on through the ages. There is a reason the tale of Ea-nāṣir became so well known: It is a story of someone who lived eons ago, and yet not a mythologised legend, but rather a true reflection of the life he lived as a merchant of substandard copper.

With this in mind, I decided to study a group of people who shared a fitting commonality: The Lores.

Who are the Lores? They are not a family, and it is unlikely many of them knew of the others’ existence at all. They are but people, throughout all of time, who shared a first name Lore, and who history deemed important enough to be memorialised. People who were named after the history they would create. Though many Lores have surely existed throughout time, not all have been preserved to the modern day, and fewer still will be covered here. But even with so few examples, their stories draw the outlines of the tapestry of human life.

Lore Noto might possibly hold the title of “Most Accomplished Lore”. Born in 1923, he spent most of his early years in an orphanage after the death of his mother. Before his rise to fame, he joined the United States Merchant Marine during World War II, where he was one of the first Merchant Seamen to receive a Purple Heart. His most renowned achievement, though, is producing The Fantasticks, one of the longest running musicals in the US.

The show, a modern Romeo and Juliet, tells of two lovers, Matt and Luisa, and their fathers’ meddling and deception. The show premiered in 1960, but was not well received at first, only later achieving acclaim and even a Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre. Production would run from 1960 all the way to 2002.

Lore Segal was a prolific author in her prime, writing based on her experiences as a Jewish refugee that fled to England during World War 2. Her third novel Her First American (1985), for example, is about the romance between a Jewish refugee and “her first American”, a middle-aged, black intellectual. This novel would win her an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Her later work, though not directly based on her experiences, still clearly draw from the same well, with her writing about being an outsider. Her fourth novel, Shakespeare’s Kitchen (2007), an anthology of 13 short stories, would be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

These Lores aren’t with us today, but they persist through their creations, the stories they told through their work. And through both their lives and their names, they tell us one thing: Every person has a story.