Questions to Ask Your Grandparents
The best questions to ask your grandparents are specific ones about ordinary life — the house they grew up in, their first job, how they met, what things cost — asked out loud and recorded rather than written down. Fifty of them follow, grouped by theme, with what you need to know to record the conversation on a phone and to keep the recording somewhere it will still be found.
The regret is always phrased the same way: I wish I had asked. The questions are not hard. What is hard is sitting down and pressing record while it still feels unnecessary.
You do not need fifty answers. Ten questions and forty minutes, recorded properly, are worth more than a plan to do it all one day.
Updated
Before you start
Begin with the story they already tell. Everyone has one — the crossing, the first car, the day they met — and asking for it costs them nothing. It is also the one the family would miss most, in exactly those words.
Record sound first and video second. A voice telling a story is what gets replayed; a nervous person being filmed is not the same storyteller. If they are comfortable on camera, film. If not, put the phone on the table and forget about it.
Ask for stories, not facts. Asking where they were born gets you a town. Asking what they could see from their bedroom window gets you ten minutes.
Then stop talking. The silence after an answer is where the second, better answer comes from. And do it in several short sittings rather than one long one: the next visit gives them time to remember what they forgot to say.
Questions about their childhood
The furthest back, and usually the easiest place to start: nobody is self-conscious about being seven.
Home
- What could you see from your bedroom window?
- Who lived in the house, and where did everyone sleep?
- What did the kitchen smell of?
- What was the street like, and who were the neighbours?
- What happened on a Sunday?
- What did you have that other children did not, and what did you go without?
School and play
- How did you get to school, and who did you walk with?
- Which teacher do you still remember, and why?
- What games did you play, and what were the rules?
- What were you not allowed to do?
- What did you want to be when you grew up?
Their parents
- What did your mother and father do all day?
- What were they like when they were angry, and when they were happy?
- What is the one thing each of them used to say?
- What do you know about your own grandparents?
Questions about work, love and the family
Work
- What was your first job, and what were you paid?
- What was the first thing you bought with your own money?
- Who taught you how to do it?
- What was the hardest job you ever did?
- What are you proudest of having made or done?
Love
- How did the two of you meet, and who spoke first?
- What did your parents think?
- What was the wedding day actually like?
- What is the secret, if there is one?
Becoming a parent
- What do you remember about the day my mother, or my father, was born?
- What were they like as a child — the honest version?
- What did you worry about as a parent that turned out not to matter?
- What did you get right?
Questions about the world they have seen
Then and now
- What is the biggest change you have seen in your lifetime?
- What did a loaf of bread, a cinema ticket and a week's rent cost?
- When did you first see a television, use a telephone, or fly?
- What did you do for fun at twenty, and where?
- What do people worry about now that nobody worried about then?
- What was better, honestly, and what was worse?
History, from where they stood
- What is the first news event you remember?
- Where were you when something happened that everybody remembers?
- What did the family live through that is never talked about?
- What did you believe at twenty that you no longer believe?
Questions for the people who come after
Save these for a later sitting. They land better once the easy ones have been enjoyed.
About the family
- Where does our name come from, and where was the family before here?
- Who in the family am I most like?
- Which family story do you suspect is not quite true?
- Which recipe, saying or habit do you want us to keep?
About a life
- What are you most grateful for?
- What would you do differently?
- What took you far too long to learn?
- Which day would you live again?
- What was the happiest period of your life, and did you know it at the time?
To the future
- What do you want your great-grandchildren to know about you?
- What advice would you give me at the age I am now?
- What should I have asked you that I have not?
How to record it on a phone
No equipment, no app to buy. What matters is distance, quiet and a copy.
Use the phone's own recorder
The voice recorder or camera app that came with the phone is enough. Nothing is recorded on our site: you record on your own device and upload the file afterwards.
Get the phone close
Sound quality is mostly distance. On the table between you, a forearm's length from them, beats any setting you could change.
Remove the noise you have stopped hearing
Television off, window shut, dishwasher finished. Put the phone in flight mode so that a call cannot end the recording.
If you film, film by a window
Sit them facing the light, with the phone on its side and propped on something rather than held. Check the first thirty seconds before carrying on.
Say the date and the names
Start every recording by saying who is speaking, who is asking, and the date. In twenty years nobody will know otherwise.
Copy it the same day
A recording on one phone lasts as long as that phone. Copy it to a computer and to one other place before you go to bed.
Where to keep the recording
Keep it in more than one place, and give a copy to at least one other member of the family. That is the whole of the advice that matters, and it is the part that gets skipped.
Then decide who it is for. A recording made this year is interesting now; it becomes something else entirely for a grandchild who is three today. A digital time capsule lets you seal the audio and video files with a letter explaining who is speaking, add the grandchildren as recipients — by name alone, if they are too young for an email address — and choose the date it opens.
A capsule has one owner, and only they can add files, so one person in the family collects the recordings and uploads them. Paid capsules include 1 GB, and more storage is a one-time fee: upload the stories worth keeping, and keep the untrimmed originals yourself. The capsule is the delivery, not your only copy.
If they would rather not
Some people do not want to be interviewed, and they are allowed not to. Try one question over the washing-up rather than a sitting with a phone on the table. Or try photographs, which do the asking for you: who is this, where was that, what happened next.
And record what they are willing to give. Ten minutes about the garden is still their voice.