How can we describe the family influence in Love Medicine?

This novel is all about family: the legacy a family can leave behind, and the influence of family members upon one another. Love Medicine is a novel that contains a series of related stories about different generations in the family. In the stories set during the contemporary era, characters refer back to their older relatives, or to some who lived generations before. The stories of the various family members sometimes provide life lessons, or romantic or thrilling tales of love or survival, or cautionary tales on what not to do (for example, when Nestor tries to work love medicine on his grandparents, he freely admits he did not follow the old ways, and his laziness causes him to do a poor version of the ritual, which he blames on making their situation worse).
The deep connection of the family ties is evident in every character's story in this volume, so it is a constant theme. But the family legacy is also its own sort of folklore, in that generations repeat the stories and treasure them as being part of their own individual experience, even if they were not personally involved. There is a sense of the family stories being important, a tradition to be carried on, and in some cases the characters are heroes or heroines, having lived through trying times (like the story of the winter of 1918, when the family was starving and Eli must learn to hunt elk) or performing great acts of selflessness or bravery. But there are also villains in the family storyline, and these are considered as significant as the admirable characters, perhaps because of the lessons their stories impart.