The records aren’t 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’ll 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 doesn’t. This is the order I push hardest on, and it’s the one people resist. Somebody tells me they’ll sit down with their mother once they’ve finished the research, and I want to take the laptop away from them. The paper will keep for decades and your mother won’t. Call her this month and let the census wait.
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 can’t 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 aren’t practised at.
So it gets postponed, reasonably and repeatedly, until it can’t happen at all. I don’t have much patience with the idea that it’s too awkward to ask. The awkwardness lasts about ten minutes, and the questions you didn’t ask stay unanswered for good.
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.
Should you record an interview with your parent?
Use the voice memo app on your phone. Put it on the table between you and stop thinking about it. The quality doesn’t matter. What matters is that recording frees you from taking notes, and note-taking is what stops you listening. If you’re writing, you’re deciding in real time what’s important, and you’re 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 can’t. 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 doesn’t 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 didn’t have.
Ask about rooms and objects, not dates
This is the single most useful technique and it’s 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.
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 can’t reconstruct the smell of a house from a census record.
Ask what they were told
Family stories are evidence even when they’re wrong, and they’re wrong more often than people expect.
Everybody who carried a story passed down through two generations has edited 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’re 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’ll find, and it deserves understanding instead of a ruling.
Correcting a parent with a census page is the quickest way I know to shut these conversations down for good. Whoever told the wrong version was protecting something or somebody, and you’ll learn far more by finding out what than by winning the point.
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.
Correcting a parent with a census page is the quickest way I know to shut these conversations down for good.
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 and more so with 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 judgment, it’s just how recall works.
Turn the television off. This sounds trivial and it’s 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.
What questions work when interviewing a parent?
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’ll 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’s the migration question and every family has one, including the ones who think they don’t.
Ask what your father did all day. People discover they don’t know. That’s itself a finding.
What’s something you know how to do that nobody in the family does now. Trades, skills, languages, recipes, ways of making things last.
Another question: 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 wasn’t 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’ll never be allowed to have again. Pushing is the mistake I’d most like people to stop making. A parent who gets cornered about the brother nobody mentions doesn’t open up. They close the subject, sometimes the whole project, and you’ve traded every story they would have told you for one they never will.
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’s 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’ve remembered six things they didn’t think of and have decided which of them they’re willing to tell you.
Two hours is about the limit for one sitting. Past that you’re both tired and the quality drops noticeably.
Three or four sessions across a few months produces something heavy, and it’s a much easier thing to ask for than one enormous interrogation. Bring photographs to the later sessions. An unlabeled photograph is the single most reliable way to unlock a memory, and it doubles as the labeling exercise you’ll otherwise never get around to.
What if your parent refuses to be interviewed?
Two situations are common enough to deal with here, and most advice skips both. Some people won’t do it. Not reluctant, unwilling. There are reasons, and they’re usually better reasons than they sound: a period they’ve spent fifty years not thinking about, a version of events other people would dispute, or a simple dislike of being the center of attention.
If somebody refuses, don’t push and don’t 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 won’t 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’s the common case, and it’s 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.
I’ve written memoirs where the subject had already died, working from their papers and interviewing the family, and a real person still came through on the page. Relatives carry more than they realize. What nobody else can give you is the way that person would have told it, and that’s exactly what you lose by waiting. 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 comes in: 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’s harder and it’s less warm. It’s also considerably better than nothing. That’s 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 doesn’t exist. Automated transcription is imperfect and adequate; you’re only producing a finding aid.
Note, against each session, who was present and roughly when. You’ll forget.
Then the documents. Once you know what you’re looking for, the research becomes targeted instead of speculative.
That’s the whole argument for doing the conversations first. I’ve written about where that research happens in this region. 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.
My take
Record your parents now, while they can still tell it their way. The census, the deeds and the obituary index will wait for you. The voice won’t. Ask about rooms and objects and skip the dates. If they refuse to sit for an interview, hand them a photograph or a recipe and let them talk while they work. Keep the audio forever, because a grandchild will care about the voice more than any transcript.
When it becomes a book
It does, and usually that wasn’t the plan at the start.
Somebody records their father for a family archive, ends up with eleven hours of audio, and realizes there’s a story in it that the rest of the family should have. That’s 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 doesn’t survive is the chronology, which nobody has ever enjoyed reading. I’ve 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 real somewhere else and whose children mostly don’t know the details. But that decision comes later and it’s optional. (See also what to do with the box of photographs) The recording isn’t optional, and it’s the part with a deadline attached whether anybody acknowledges it or not.
Families lose these voices all the time because somebody assumed there’d be time later, and it’s a needless loss, because the fix costs a phone and an afternoon. Call your parent this week, put the phone on the table, and ask about the kitchen.
Behind the Wire is my grandfather’s story as a prisoner of war, built from the journal he wrote after the war. It shows what a recorded family story can become.
