This article explores the contribution that narrative can make to more mainstream historiography. It is an approach that is better positioned to give readers an opportunity to understand and perhaps empathise with individual experiences, as a facet of a wider issue under inquiry. The article draws on a PhD narrative inquiry which uses narrative as method and text to investigate how people with Scottish and Irish backgrounds live out their connections to their cultural traditions in Aotearoa New Zealand. Planned as an exploration of the discursive construction of culture and identity, I came to see the inquiry as historiography, though different from mainstream western historiography. This commentary focuses on the explicit presence of the researcher/writer in the text, the use of longer interview narratives which can present issues of memory and perceptions of truth, and finally the importance of the reader or audience in narrative inquiry as an approach to history.