How to Interview a Relative

Every family historian eventually says the same thing: I wish I'd asked her while she was still here. Records can be found later; memory cannot. A recorded conversation with an older relative is the single most valuable and most time-sensitive thing you can do, and it's easier than people expect — one hour, a phone on the table, and a list of questions you barely stick to. This page covers what to ask, how to record it, how to handle subjects that turn out to be painful, and what to do with the recording afterwards. Having the printable family tree to hand during the conversation is genuinely useful for keeping names straight.

How Do You Prepare?

Thirty minutes of preparation makes an enormous difference, and over-preparing makes it worse.

Ask properly, in advance. "Can I record you talking about growing up?" gives someone time to think, and most people are pleased to be asked. Explain who it's for and what you'll do with it.

Do basic research first, so you know roughly which decades and places you're covering, and so you don't waste the hour establishing facts a certificate could have told you. Trace family tree free covers the groundwork.

Bring prompts, not a script. Photographs, old maps, documents, objects. These are the single most effective memory triggers there are, and far better than direct questions.

Prepare 15 to 20 questions and expect to use six. The interview should follow the conversation, not the list.

Pick a good time and place. Somewhere quiet and familiar, when they're at their best — for many older people that's mid-morning. Avoid busy rooms, television, and cafés.

Plan for an hour. Ninety minutes is the outside limit, and several shorter sessions produce better material than one long one.

Go now if there's any doubt. Twenty imperfect minutes recorded today beats the perfect interview you were planning for the summer. This is the one piece of advice everyone in genealogy gives and too few take.

What Should You Ask?

Open questions that invite a story, not questions with a yes or no answer.

Childhood and daily life — the richest seam, and where most people are comfortable starting:

• What's your earliest memory?
• What was the house like? How many rooms, who slept where?
• What did you eat in an ordinary week?
• How did you get to school, and what was it like?
• What did you do for fun? What were you afraid of?

Family and relationships:

• Tell me about your parents. What were they actually like?
• What do you remember about your grandparents?
• Who else lived nearby? Who visited?
• Were there family arguments? Anyone nobody talked about?
• How did your parents meet?

Work and money:

• What was your first job? What did it pay?
• What did your father and mother do?
• Was money ever tight? What happened then?

Big events:

• What do you remember about the war years?
• Do you remember moving house or country?
• What changed most in your lifetime?

The good open-ended ones, which often produce the best material:

• What's the story people in this family always tell?
• What do you wish you'd asked your own parents?
• What would you want your great-grandchildren to know?
• Is there anything I haven't asked about that you'd like to say?

Always finish with that last one. It regularly produces the most valuable minutes of the entire recording.

How Should You Record It?

A phone is enough. The voice memo app on any modern phone produces perfectly good audio. Don't buy equipment.

Practical points:

• Put the phone in airplane mode, so a call doesn't interrupt or stop the recording
• Check storage and battery beforehand
• Test for ten seconds and play it back before you start. This catches the one failure mode that ruins interviews
• Phone on a table between you, not in a hand or a pocket
• Quiet room, no television, no ticking clock
• Say the date, place and names at the start — future listeners won't know who is speaking

Video adds gestures, expressions and the person's face, which families value enormously. It also makes some people self-conscious. Ask, and don't push.

By phone or video call, record with permission using the platform's recording function or a second device. Audio is slightly worse and it's vastly better than nothing.

Take a few written notes — names, spellings, dates, things to follow up — but keep your attention on the person rather than the notepad.

Back it up the same day. Copy the file to a computer and to cloud storage before anything else. Irreplaceable recordings are lost to broken phones every year, and this takes two minutes.

How Do You Handle the Conversation Itself?

The skills are conversational rather than technical.

Ask, then be quiet. The most common mistake is filling silence. Older people often need a few seconds to reach a memory, and interrupting that pause loses it. Count to five before you speak again.

Follow the tangent. If they drift from your question to something unrelated, go with it. The unplanned material is usually the best.

Ask "what was that like?" rather than moving to the next question. It's the single most productive follow-up in oral history.

Don't correct them. If a date is wrong, note it and check later. Contradicting someone mid-flow stops them talking, and their version is itself data — how a family remembers something is worth recording alongside what the records say.

Use objects when memory stalls. "I don't remember" often becomes half an hour of detail once a photograph is on the table. Hand over the picture and ask who's in it.

Watch for tiredness. Stop before they flag. You can come back, and an interview that ends while someone is still enjoying it guarantees a second one.

On difficult subjects — bereavement, estrangement, poverty, war, things the family doesn't discuss:

• Ask once, gently, and clearly signal it's fine to decline
• If they say no, move on and don't return to it
• If they become upset, stop the interview and be a relative rather than an interviewer
• Ask about consent again afterwards for anything sensitive they did share
• The relationship matters more than the recording, always

Bring something to the conversation too. If you've found a record they didn't know about — a ship's manifest, a census entry showing the house they described — showing it changes the dynamic from interrogation to shared discovery, and people talk far more freely once they can see you're genuinely interested rather than collecting data.

Thank them properly, and tell them what you'll do with it. Many older people worry their life wasn't interesting enough to record; being told otherwise means a great deal.

Who Should You Interview, and in What Order?

Not everyone at once, and not necessarily the oldest first.

Interview siblings separately. Two people raised in the same house will describe it differently, remember different incidents, and disagree about basic facts. That contrast is data, and it disappears if you interview them together — one usually defers to the other.

Don't skip the person who wasn't really involved. The quiet aunt, the in-law, the family friend who lived next door. People slightly outside the family often observed things nobody inside it thought worth mentioning.

Go back to good sources more than once. Memory works associatively, and a second conversation weeks later — after they've been thinking about it — frequently produces material the first one didn't reach.

Tell relatives what others said, within reason. "Your brother mentioned the shop on the corner" is often all it takes to unlock a whole afternoon.

What Do You Do Afterwards?

The step most people skip, which is what turns a recording into something usable.

Back it up immediately — three copies, one off-site.

Label it clearly: who, when, where, who was present. A file called `voice-memo-047` is lost.

Transcribe it, or at least index it. Full transcription is slow but transformative; automatic transcription tools are now good enough for a first pass that you correct. If that's too much, an index — a list of timestamps and topics — takes twenty minutes and makes the recording searchable.

Note the follow-ups. Names to look up, dates to verify, places to check, and questions for next time.

Check the facts against records, and keep both versions where they differ. The discrepancy is often interesting in itself.

Share it back. Send a copy to the person you interviewed and to close family. It's a gift, and it usually prompts other relatives to volunteer.

Do the next one. Interview siblings separately — different people remember the same household completely differently, and the contrast is revealing.

Use it. Quoted directly, a relative's own words are the most memorable material in any family history — see how to write a family history and how to create a family history book. If they've shown you photographs or papers, that's also the moment to deal with them properly, covered in how to preserve old family photos and how to digitize family documents.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should I ask an older relative about family history?

Start with childhood and daily life — the house, meals, school, games — which people find easiest to talk about. Then move to family, work and major events. Always finish with "is there anything I haven't asked that you'd like to say?"

How should I record a family history interview?

A phone's voice memo app is enough. Put it in airplane mode, test and play back ten seconds first, place it on a table between you, and state the date, place and names at the start. Back the file up the same day.

What if my relative says they don't remember anything?

Bring photographs, old maps, documents and objects. These unlock memory far more effectively than direct questions, and a relative who says they remember nothing will often talk for an hour once a picture is in front of them.

How do I ask about difficult family subjects?

Ask once, gently, and make clear it's fine to decline. If they say no, move on. If they become upset, stop being an interviewer. Ask again afterwards about consent for anything sensitive they did share.

How long should a family history interview be?

About an hour, with ninety minutes as an outside limit. Several shorter sessions produce better material than one long one, and stopping before your relative tires means you'll be welcome back.

What do I do with the recording afterwards?

Back it up in three places, label it with who, when and where, and either transcribe it or create a timestamped index of topics. Share a copy with the person and with close family, then note the facts you want to verify.

A last thought on why this matters more than the rest of genealogy. Records tell you that someone was born, married, worked and died. They almost never tell you what a person was like — how they spoke, what made them laugh, what they were frightened of, what they thought about the choices they made. That only exists in living memory, and it exists for a limited time.

The recording you make this month is the one thing in genealogy that can't be recreated later. Bring photographs, ask open questions, leave silences alone, and back the file up the same day. If you've been meaning to do this, do it now rather than well. Keep the names and relationships straight during the conversation with the printable family tree.