On November 22, 1963, Dallas businessman and home movie enthusiast Abraham Zapruder took his Bell & Howell Zoomatic movie camera to Dealey Plaza to record President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade as it passed.  Zapruder ended up capturing President Kennedy’s assassination on film in what is now often called “the most famous home movie ever recorded.”  The weekend’s horror continued just two days after the President’s murder when assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was himself shot and killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.  Millions watched on live television as Ruby murdered Oswald.

Everyone immediately realized the Zapruder film’s importance, including LIFE magazine, which paid Zapruder $150,000 for the film just a day after the shooting. Thus began more than three decades of legal wrangling over the film and its copyright. The U.S. government ultimately paid the Zapruder family $16 million for the camera-original film in 1999, and the family has since donated the copyright to the Sixth Floor Museum, located in the former Texas School Book Depository building from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot the President 55 years ago.

The film is graphic, awful, and fascinating all at once. The lives of the Kennedy family were immediately changed by the events captured on Zapruder’s short film. But what about the lives of the Zapruders? How did the film affect them? How does it continue to impact them today, more than half a century after the Kennedy assassination? “Zapruder” is certainly not a commonly-heard surname, so many modern-day Zapruders are regularly asked if they have a relation to the film.

In 2016, Alexandra Zapruder, granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder, published Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film to tell her family’s side of the story and its relationship with the famous film. Her family’s story is poignant: that of a Jewish immigrant family that came here in search of the American dream and revered President Kennedy and his vision for their adopted country. Zapruder’s own father (Abraham’s son) wrote a passionate letter to President Kennedy seeking a job in his administration and began working for the Kennedy Justice Department less than a month before the assassination.

Author Alexandra Zapruder was kind enough to answer some questions about her book and her family’s history with the Zapruder film. Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film is available in hardback, paperback, and e-book editions. Ms. Zapruder is also the author of Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust.

1. Why did you decide to write a book interweaving your family’s own story with the larger history of the film and its iconic status?

I had nurtured a vague idea of writing about the film for many years. But it wasn’t until after my father died in 2006 that I began to have a real sense of urgency about learning this history, grappling with some of my own questions about it, and trying to fuse our private family story with the public one. I came to understand that our family’s experiences shaped the life of the film and vice versa; the unique nature of this interplay between private and public meant that this story could only be told by a Zapruder.

2. Did anyone in your family oppose you writing this book and telling some of your family’s history related to the film?

Our family has always been very private and it’s been our custom to shun publicity or attention related to the film. This was mostly out of respect for the Kennedy family but also out of genuine sense of sadness about our family’s connection to this national tragedy. So, there were people in my family who were uncomfortable with my decision to write about it, though no one opposed it in an aggressive way. It was simply not in the prevailing culture of our family. It made the early work extremely difficult and it took a lot of soul searching to be sure that I was engaging in this work for the right reasons. That said, the external pressure ended up being very good for the book because it made me extra scrupulous, extra careful, and extra vigilant about making sure I treated the work with the utmost dignity and seriousness.

3. Did your grandfather ever express any doubt about the Warren Commission’s conclusions based on what he saw in his own famous film?

Not that I’m aware of. I think he believed the Warren Commission.

4. You discuss your father’s admiration for President Kennedy and the letter he wrote the President seeking to be part of the “New Frontier.” How did he feel about not only being the son of Abraham Zapruder—who filmed the assassination—but then being the family member for years responsible for the film showing the violent murder of the president he so admired?

My father was deeply grieved by President Kennedy’s assassination and by our family’s connection to it through the film. He loved his father and he had seen how the killing and the film traumatized him. He felt an enormous sense of responsibility when it became his burden to manage, and he did his best to balance the public interest in the film with our family’s values. He never liked anything about it but he handled this often thankless task with honesty and a lot of heart, as he did everything else in his life.

5. What was it about President Kennedy that made both Abraham and Henry Zapruder admire him so much?

I think, like so many others, they saw him as young, vital, energetic, and hopeful. I think they shared his values of fairness, equality, justice, and the great potential of America to be a beacon of democracy to the whole world. These sounds like very naïve and innocent notions from the vantage point of today, but I think both my grandfather and father shared those ideals and saw Kennedy as a leader who embodied them.

6. Was anyone in your family critical of your grandfather’s selling of the film to LIFE? What about of Henry’s handling of the film during his years as its “caretaker”?

No. Our family stood together through difficult and trying times and never once argued, disagreed, or questioned the judgments or decisions of my grandfather and, later, my father. We trusted them to act in accordance with our family’s values and to handle incredibly difficult, complex and painful dilemmas in the best way they could. I think I can safely speak for my family in saying that we are all proud of how they each handled the film in their own very different times.

7. Do you think LIFE magazine made the right decision in not printing the Zapruder film’s most violent images from the assassination? Did that decision somehow play into the propagation of conspiracy theories?

I think it was a decision that was right for the time. It would have been too shocking, too disrespectful to the president and his family, and totally unnecessary to print the images in the immediate aftermath.

I don’t think the conspiracy theories were propagated by that one decision, though I do believe that LIFE Magazine’s insistence on keeping the film from the public for as long as they did – while I entirely understand the reasons for their actions – had the unintended consequence of fueling conspiracy theories. This was in part because the longer the public didn’t see the film, the more suspicious they became, but it was also because the inability to get access to proper versions of the film led to distribution of poor quality bootlegs, often at the behest of ardent conspiracy theorists. It may have happened anyway – Oswald’s murder was one big factor among many – but it certainly didn’t help that the film was only accessible through underground channels.

8. How did Abraham Zapruder’s background as an immigrant to the United States affect not only his view of President Kennedy’s administration, but also his feeling of responsibility for the proper use of the film?

My grandfather loved America. He came here poor, uneducated, and traumatized by an incredibly painful early life. America welcomed him and gave him opportunity, an education, and the possibility to live in freedom and pursue the life he wanted. That experience shaped absolutely every single thing about him, as it probably does for anyone who is able to start a new life in a country that has granted asylum. I think more than his background, it was his basic values that shaped his sense of responsibility for the film. He loved the president and he did not want to be agent of anything that would exploit his death.

9. You were born many years after President Kenney’s assassination and just months before your grandfather’s death. How much did both the film and your grandfather’s memory impact your own upbringing and your sense of what it means to be a Zapruder?

Growing up, being a Zapruder meant a lot of things but few of them had anything to do with the film. My identity was shaped by the values of my family, by being Jewish, progressive Democrats, Washingtonians, and many other things besides. For me, my grandfather’s memory was passed down by the family stories told about him – none of which had anything to do with the film. I knew about it but it wasn’t a defining aspect of our family’s life – at least not in an overt way. Part of the process of writing this book was uncovering how the film shaped various aspects of our family history and how who we are as a family also shaped how we handled this extraordinary burden and responsibility. It was the writing of the book that allowed me to grapple with all of these private and personal dimensions of the film in our family and try to come to terms with it.

10. How do you feel about your grandfather’s famous film, which for so long was not seen by the general public because of the violence it shows, now being available to anyone on an outlet like You Tube?

It’s just the way of the world. The Zapruder film is just one of are many things that I wish weren’t so readily and easily available on You Tube or elsewhere on the internet – including pornography, beheadings of innocent people by Isis, and mind-numbingly inane videos marketed to kids. But technology has changed everything and since freedom remains among our highest values, I don’t believe we can or should censoring that content either. I think the burden is on us to make wise choices about what we consume and why, and to teach our children that although access to information may be a given, it’s not required that we partake of it just because it’s there. We have to know our values and choose what to consume in accordance with them.

11. Does your family still get accused of greed because of how much Abraham Zapruder received from LIFE magazine for the film or how much the government paid the family for it? How do you respond to such accusations?  Do you think your honesty in your book about how much the government paid your family for the film in the 1990s might increase such accusations?

This is a hard question to answer without immediately becoming defensive but I will try. I’m not aware of ongoing accusations of greed toward our family although, of course, if I read every comment or scoured the Internet for opinions about us, I’m sure I would find them. I wouldn’t respond to an accusation of greed if it were leveled at me but that’s really because I think I addressed that question as best as I could in the book. I plumbed the topic as honestly and thoroughly as I could because I felt that the questions were sufficiently nuanced and complex to warrant examining them. I was looking for a deeper level of understanding than a simple judgment of whether we were greedy or generous, good or bad, right or wrong.

12. Do the youngest Zapruders—your own children, for instance—have any idea of what made their ancestor Abraham Zapruder so famous? At what age do young Zapruders learn about Abraham, the Kennedy assassination, the film, etc.?

Yes, the next generation of Zapruders (except for the very youngest child) knows about the film. They’ve learned about it at different times, depending on how the subject crossed their paths or when they asked about it. In certain ways, we have followed our own parents’ example in that the film is not a major focus of our family identity but, when it comes up, we have all taught our children that this is a serious topic, a big responsibility, and one that should always be treated with deference and respect. It is not something to brag about or to take lightly. On the other hand, it’s different for us – we can answer questions and talk about it with less pain than our parents’ generation did. The other big difference is that I wrote a book about it. I untangled a lot of questions and wrestled with them on our family’s behalf. So, when they are old enough, our kids will be able to read that story and come to their own conclusions about it.