Wiktionary
n. (label en set phrase) The collective lore, beliefs, and traditional story which help to define a society, culture, or nation.
Wikipedia
Folk memory is a term sometimes used to describe stories, folklore or myths about past events that have been passed orally from generation to generation. The events described by the memories may date back hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of years and often have a local significance. They may explain physical features in the local environment, provide reasons for cultural traditions or give etymologies for the names of local places.
Usage examples of "folk memory".
It's folk memory, the time of legends and heroes and myths, and anything that happens gets crammed into that framework.
Even as is, they remain uneasily aware of our existence, though less so, I own to my relief, in this teeming faceless metropolis of London where no one knows his neighbor, or cares to, than in the hidden faraway mountains and valleys whence our kind sprang and where folk memory and fear run back forever.
Armies had marched across Lancre many times over the last few thousand years, and the recollection of the castle's thick safe walls had been practically engraved in the folk memory.
What lives in folk memory is truer than how some artsy poet says it.
Town and Foregate would ring with the many and contradictory accounts of this mornings events, to be transmuted at last into myth, a folk memory of momentous things witnessed, once, long ago.
Some details of the tomb were certain to be preserved in the folk memory of the Valley of Sorrows, and one form of preservation may be the fanciful tale of Wolf, who conies to a cave with Fire Girl and climbs up a natural stone chimney.