The fate of our earliest autobiographical memories has been a matter of intense speculation for over a century (e.g., Freud, 1905/1953; Henri & Henri, 1895). The enduring interest in this topic has become stronger over the past few decades as important mental health and forensic questions on the accuracy and durability of adults’ memories of childhood experiences have required answers. Coincident with (and partly as a consequence of) these questions, researchers have examined the fate of early memories in normally developing children and adults (for a review, see Howe, 2000). With this research direction, the emphasis shifted from the offset of infantile amnesia to its converse – the onset and development of autobiographical memory. We (e.g., Howe & Courage, 1993, 1997; Howe, Courage, & Edison, 2003; Howe, Courage, & Rooksby, 2009) have maintained that the necessary though not sufficient foundation for this achievement is the emergence of the cognitive self. The cognitive self refers to that objective aspect of the self that embodies the unique and recognizable features and characteristics that constitute one’s self concept, or “me.” This sense of the self contrasts with a different but related facet of the self that comprises the more subjective aspects of the self as a thinker, knower, and causal agent, or “I” (for a review see Courage & Howe, 2002). The cognitive self becomes stable at about 2 years of age and serves as a new organizer around which events can be encoded, stored, and retrieved as personal; that is, rather than being a memory for something that has happened, it is a memory of something that happened to “me.” Subsequent developments in basic memory processes (e.g., encoding, storage, and retrieval) as well as language and other aspects of social cognition serve to elaborate and refine characteristics of the self and help to shape the nature and durability of autobiographical recall.