Interviewing Your Own Parent or Grandparent

The records are not going anywhere.

The 1940 census will be there in ten years. The obituary index covering 1855 to 1990 will be there. The land transactions, the newspaper archives, the twenty thousand photographs in a vault in Tampa, all of it will still exist long after everybody reading this is gone.

The person who remembers why the family left, what the first apartment looked like, and which argument nobody will discuss at Thanksgiving is on a completely different timeline.

That asymmetry should decide the order you do things in, and for most people it does not.

Why people get this backwards

Almost everybody starts with a subscription site, builds a tree of names and dates, and gets somewhere satisfying quite quickly, because databases are designed to give you a result.

Then years later they think to ask the living relatives, and by then one of them has died and another cannot reliably remember.

The reason the order gets inverted is that research feels like progress and a conversation feels like an imposition. Opening a database is easy and costs nothing emotionally. Asking your father to sit down and talk about his childhood for two hours requires a directness most families are not practised at.

So it gets postponed, reasonably, repeatedly, until it cannot happen at all.

The other reason is a belief that you need equipment, training, or a list of the right questions. You need none of those. You need a phone and a willingness to be slightly awkward for the first ten minutes.

Record it

Use the voice memo app on your phone. Put it on the table between you and stop thinking about it.

The quality does not matter. What matters is that recording frees you from taking notes, and note-taking is what stops you listening. If you are writing, you are deciding in real time what is important, and you are deciding badly, because the thing that turns out to matter is almost never the thing that sounded significant at the time.

Recording also preserves something a transcript cannot. How they say it. The pause before a particular name. The thing they laugh at. The story they have clearly told two hundred times, polished smooth, versus the one that arrives haltingly because nobody has asked before.

Ask permission and be direct about it. Something like wanting to get this down properly so it does not get lost. Almost nobody refuses, and the ones who hesitate usually agree once the phone has been sitting there for twenty minutes and stopped being interesting.

Back it up the same day. A recording that exists only on the phone you dropped in the pool is a conversation you did not have.

Ask about rooms and objects, not dates

This is the single most useful technique and it is counterintuitive.

Nobody remembers what year they moved. Everybody remembers the kitchen.

Chronological questions produce chronological answers, which are thin, uncertain and often wrong. Sensory questions produce narrative, because memory is stored against places and things, not against a timeline.

So: what did the house smell like. What was on the walls. Where did everybody sit. What did your mother keep in that drawer. What was the noise outside. Who owned a car and what was it like. What did you eat on an ordinary Tuesday.

Then follow whatever moves. A question about a kitchen produces a story about a person, and the person is what you were after.

You can pin dates down afterwards from documents. You cannot reconstruct the smell of a house from a census record.

Ask what they were told

Family stories are evidence even when they are wrong, and they are wrong more often than people expect.

A story that has been passed down through two generations has been edited by everybody who carried it, and the edits are informative. What got softened tells you what somebody was ashamed of. What got sharpened tells you what somebody wanted remembered. What got dropped entirely is usually the interesting part.

So ask directly what they were told, and by whom, and when. Distinguish it from what they saw themselves. Both are worth having and they are not the same category of fact.

When you later find a document that contradicts the family version, resist the urge to correct anybody immediately. The gap between the record and the story is the most interesting thing you will find, and it deserves understanding instead of a ruling.

Where to sit and when to do it

The setting decides more than the questions do.

Do it at their table, in their house, with their things around them. Memory is anchored to objects, and a person surrounded by forty years of accumulated objects will produce far more than the same person in your living room.

Do it one to one if you possibly can. A third person in the room changes what gets said, especially if that person is a sibling or a spouse, and particularly about anything difficult. Family members correct each other’s memories reflexively, and correction shuts a story down.

Mid-morning tends to work better than evening. People are sharper, less tired, and less likely to have had a drink, and none of that is a judgement, it is just how recall works.

Turn the television off. This sounds trivial and it is the single biggest practical obstacle in most houses.

And build in a reason to stop. An open-ended session makes both of you anxious. Saying you have about an hour and a half gives them permission to relax into it, and it almost always runs over anyway.

Questions that reliably work

Not a script, because a script produces an interview and you want a conversation. But these are the ones that open doors.

Describe the house you grew up in, room by room. This is the best single opening question there is, and it will usually run twenty minutes on its own.

What did an ordinary weekday look like when you were twelve. Ordinary is the key word, because everybody has rehearsed the extraordinary and nobody has ever been asked about a Tuesday.

Who was the first person in the family to come here, and what were they leaving. That is the migration question and every family has one, including the ones who think they do not.

What did your father do all day. People discover they do not know, which is itself a finding.

What is something you know how to do that nobody in the family does now. Trades, skills, languages, recipes, ways of making things last.

What did you worry about. It produces a very different answer from what happened to you.

And, near the end, what do you wish somebody had asked your parents.

The difficult questions

There will be some. An early death nobody explained. A marriage that was not one. A gap of several years that nobody accounts for. A person who stopped being mentioned.

Ask them late in the conversation, once you have both settled, and ask them once, gently.

Accept a refusal without pushing. A refusal is information too, and pressing turns a two-hour conversation into a two-hour conversation you will never be allowed to have again.

Sometimes the answer arrives three weeks later, unprompted, over the phone, because the question has been sitting there since you left. That happens far more often than people expect and it is the main argument for asking at all.

And consider in advance what you intend to do with a difficult answer. A family history written for descendants is a different document from one written for the person doing the research, and the difference is mostly about what gets included and how.

Do it more than once

The second conversation is always better than the first.

The first one is spent getting past the polished anecdotes and the awkwardness of the setup. Then you leave, and the questions keep working. By the time you come back, they have remembered six things they did not think of and have decided which of them they are willing to tell you.

Two hours is about the limit for one sitting. Beyond that both of you are tired and the quality drops noticeably.

Three or four sessions across a few months produces something genuinely substantial, and it is a much easier thing to ask for than one enormous interrogation.

Bring photographs to the later sessions. An unlabelled photograph is the single most reliable way to unlock a memory, and it doubles as the labelling exercise you will otherwise never get around to.

If they refuse, or if it is too late

Two situations worth addressing honestly, because they are common and most advice skips them.

Some people will not do it. Not reluctant, genuinely unwilling. There are reasons, and they are usually better reasons than they sound: a period they have spent fifty years not thinking about, a version of events other people would dispute, or a simple dislike of being the centre of attention.

If somebody refuses, do not push and do not treat it as a problem to be solved. What works instead is the side door. Ask about a photograph. Ask about a recipe. Ask them to teach you something they know how to do. A great many people who will not sit for an interview will talk for two hours while doing a task, and the recorder can be on the table the whole time.

The other situation is that the person is already gone. That is the common case, and it is not the end of the exercise.

Their siblings, cousins and friends remember them, and remember things the immediate family never knew. Somebody who worked with them for twenty years has a version of that person their children have never heard.

Letters, cards and inscriptions in books carry their voice directly. So do the margins of anything they owned.

And the documents fill a surprising amount, which is where the research side takes over: census records, the obituary index covering 1855 to 1990, land records, and the newspaper archives that carry the incidental mentions nobody thinks to look for.

A life can be reconstructed from the outside. It is harder and it is less warm. It is also considerably better than nothing, which is the alternative.

What to do with the recordings

Keep the audio. Whatever else happens, the audio is the artifact, and a grandchild who never met this person will care about the voice more than any transcript.

Get it transcribed, because an untranscribed recording is unsearchable and unsearchable material effectively does not exist. Automated transcription is imperfect and adequate; you are producing a finding aid, not a publication.

Note, against each session, who was present and roughly when. You will forget.

Then the documents. Once you know what you are looking for, the research becomes targeted instead of speculative, which is the whole argument for doing the conversations first. I have written about where that research happens in this region. The short version is that one of the largest genealogy collections in the southeastern United States sits on a fourth floor in downtown Tampa, free and open to anyone with no library card required.

When it becomes a book

It does, and usually that was not the plan at the start.

Somebody records their father for a family archive, ends up with eleven hours of audio, and realises there is a story in it that the rest of the family should have. That is a different project from the recording, and it needs structure, selection and a shape, because nobody reads eleven hours of transcript.

What survives the transition is the specific. The room, the object, the thing they said in their own words. What does not survive is the chronology, which nobody has ever enjoyed reading.

I have written about the particular Florida version of this in the piece on retiring here with a life behind you. This county is full of people who did something substantial somewhere else and whose children mostly do not know the details.

But that decision comes later and it is optional. (See also what to do with the box of photographs) The recording is not optional, and it is the part that has a deadline attached whether anybody acknowledges it or not.

Frequently Asked Questions