Like many of you, I remember exactly where I was on the morning of September 11th, 2001.

I was a senior here at Syracuse University walking to class when I first heard the news.

But as we mark the 25th anniversary of nine eleven, I can't help but notice the growing number of people around me who have no memory of that day, including some of my WPBS coworkers.

Take WPBS intern Ruth Quinal, for example.

She was born in 2006.

Her first time really learning about nine eleven and its impact came in school.

I remember it distinctly in my seventh grade history class.

- I was two years old when the September 11 attacks happened.

- WPBS producer Luke Smith says his family rarely discussed nine eleven and his teachers skimmed over it too.

- It was mostly just in passing.

Like they never really taught us about it in school.

- That concerns St.

Lawrence County historian Nancy Lafaver.

She encourages families, teachers who lived through it to pass on their experience, their memories.

- If we don't keep that human peace alive, it just becomes a headline and dry.

And I don't think that honors the Americans and our neighbors that helped us.

I don't think it honors the people who were brave and courageous.

I think it just kind of puts it aside and we don't want it put aside.

- Like me, Lafaver remembers exactly where she was on September 11th, 2001.

Working in a school administrative office, eyes glued to the TV when the second plane hit.

- We were all just stunned.

Completely, we couldn't think of anything to say.

We were just totally stunned.

And it was at that moment that I realized, oh my goodness, something other than a freak accident with dire consequences was going on.

- Lafaver has spent years archiving how the attacks changed St.

Lawrence County and she says there's more work to do.

- There are stories out there we haven't heard yet and people will say, "Oh, that's just an ordinary story."

No, that's an angle or a piece that needs to be preserved.

- Tanya Roy has been thinking about that same challenge.

How do you preserve the emotional connection to September 11th for generations that weren't there?

- One generation or two generations of Americans have that shared human experience, and now there are two generations after us that don't.

And it's almost like we speak a different language when it feels so very important to us to hold on to who we were as a people before and who we became as a people after, because how do you relate that to someone that didn't live through that?

To - Help bridge the gap, Roy is producing a documentary called The North Country Remembers nine eleven 25 years later.

It's an effort to capture stories from local people about their experiences on 9/11 and the days that followed.

While some of those stories are being recorded.

When I heard it was terrorists, I though they'd done it deliberately to disrupt the election.

A different story is being brought to life on stage.

At the Strand, the Watertown Lyric Theater is rehearsing WTC view.

- Everything that's happening, it's really affected people's relationships.

- A play director Craig Thornton says captures the raw emotion of September 11th on a deeply personal scale.

- The play is so specific and such a microcosm of what it was like to be a regular person in New York, and it's so driven by emotions and personal experience.

- Part autobiography, part fiction, the play introduces audiences to a group of New Yorkers navigating the fear and uncertainty so many of us felt in the days following 9/11.

- If you lived in some part far away from New York, your experience isn't maybe as intense as a New Yorker, but it's still an experience that everyone had and I still think it shapes the way that we feel and the way that we behave and the way that we run our lives today.

And maybe somebody who wasn't alive then doesn't understand that their life is affected by it.

- Understanding it is one thing.

- The only thing worse than being there was not have been allowed to go.

- Feeling connected to it is harder.

- The closest we can get is to hear people tell those stories in their own voices and to see them as they're doing it and to see the emotion that it elicits in them.

And that's what art does for us, is it allows us to sit in the dark and share a human experience whether or not we personally have experienced it.

- One morning, 25 years ago, I walked these sidewalks at Syracuse University not realizing I was about to witness one of the defining moments of my generation.

Today, most students here only know 9/11 through the stories they've been told.

And maybe that's what never forget has always meant because memories don't last forever, but stories often do.