A friend of mine remarked that it would be interesting to know more about Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus, and how he raised his family. He wasn't the first to notice how little is recorded in the gospels. I wasn't the first to respond that the Bible does not seem to put much weight on the question.
My next-in-sequence thought is how there could be interest in having more information about a lot of people. My obvious example today was my father's father. My father knew his father from 1913 through 1941. Much of that time my father was very young but the resulting lack of information is partly made up by stories from his mother and some cousins.
There are a few suggestive vignettes which hint at a personality. Many of those were probably pre-selected as family stories to be told every year.
There are a few photographs (several of them taken by my dad) and a death certificate. There used to be a war diary, presumably intended to record the adventures of the Spanish American War; since the entire experience was so utterly unadventurous I let the journal be sold when we finally sold his uniform. The correspondence about his railroad pension is kept by the archives of the National Railroad Museum.
There used to be a workbench for the shop and a trapeze for the barn. The house he owned in Green Bay survives (although much changed); one of the 3 houses in Oneida survived a long time but I am unsure whether it is one still standing. The ax he used to break ice on the spring at another Oneida house was stolen half a century ago.
The cow died, of course, as have all the people.
More stories and artifacts survived the 80 years from his death than survived Joseph. The elapsed time is far less and my father made a concerted effort. Yet I could not reconstruct his life with any confidence beyond the bare outline of where his houses sat and what employment he had.
Even if his doubled bitted ax had not be taken, even if we could have a Grandpa Cardinal Museum where you could look at the chip in the blade from one year's heavy ice; if we had held onto the old tools and mounted the trapeze in an emulated barn in the corner; what would you really know about growing up with him in the 1920s?
And so in actual reality I think maybe it is better we only have a few hints. Maybe it is better for us to have to imagine what it was like -- and then have someone else imagine some other possibility. Because what we humans are good at is imagining and making up new stories, because our strength overall is less in reproducing what actually was and more in creating new stories about what might be.