Questions to Ask Your Grandparents
Forty questions, including the ones that reach back another generation - because your grandparent is the last person who can answer those.
Why these questions are different
A grandparent list is not a parent list with the ages moved. Two things genuinely change.
They are the last witness to the generation above them. Try naming your eight great-grandparents; most people manage two or three and can say nothing about any of them. Those people were not lost to time - they were lost in a single generation, because nobody asked the one person who remembered them. That is why the second section of this list matters more than the rest put together.
Grandchildren get better answers. Grandparents are consistently more forthcoming with a grandchild than they ever were with their own children. There is less history in the room, and the question reads as interest rather than as an inventory being taken.
The world they grew up in
What a grandchild actually wants is the texture of a world they cannot picture. These get it.
- What did your street look like? Who lived next door?
- Was there a telephone in the house? Who else used it?
- How did news reach you - what did you hear first, and from whom?
- What did your family do in the evening before television?
- What did a week’s shopping look like, and where did it come from?
- How did you get about? How far was far?
- What did people wear on an ordinary day?
- What did a doctor’s visit involve?
- What was school actually like - the room, the teacher, the punishments?
- What did you think the future was going to be like?
Their parents and grandparents
The most valuable section on this page by a wide margin. Your grandparent is the last living witness to these people; after this, they exist only as names on a form.
- What was your father like? What did he do all day?
- What was your mother like before she was your mother?
- What did your parents never talk about?
- Did you know your own grandparents? What do you remember of them?
- What did your grandmother’s house smell like?
- Where did our family come from, and why did they leave?
- What language was spoken at home, or by the older ones?
- What did the family do for work, going back as far as you know?
- Is there a story about our family that came down to you from before your time?
- What happened to the ones who did not stay?
Their own life
Concrete before abstract. Work, money and machines open more doors than feelings do.
- What was your first job, and who taught you to do it?
- What did things cost - a loaf, a bus fare, a house?
- How did you meet Grandma/Grandpa? The long version.
- What did you do on your first date?
- What was the first home you had together?
- What is the hardest work you have ever done?
- What were you frightened of that turned out not to matter?
- What is the best thing you ever owned?
- Where did you go on holiday, and how did you get there?
- What is the furthest you have ever been from home?
Questions only a grandchild can ask
These land differently coming from a grandchild than from a son or daughter - and grandparents answer them far more openly.
- What were my mum/dad like as a child? Tell me something they would not tell me.
- What was it like when I was born?
- Who in the family do I most take after, and in what way?
- What do you wish you had done at my age?
- What advice did you ignore, and were you right to?
- What do you know now that you would tell your twenty-year-old self?
- What do you want me to remember about you?
- What should I ask you that I have not thought of?
- Is there anything you would like put right, or written down properly?
- What was the happiest ordinary day you can remember?
Four practical notes
- Short sessions. Half an hour is plenty, and it can happen weekly. Somebody who is no longer working can sustain this for a year, which produces a genuinely substantial record.
- Long-term memory outlasts short-term memory. If a grandparent is becoming forgetful, childhood may still be completely available. Follow whatever thread they offer and do not correct the chronology.
- Record the audio. Accents are a one-generation thing. The way your grandmother pronounces the town she was born in is written down nowhere on earth.
- Ask about the photographs. Bring a handful, halfway through. It is the best interview prompt there is, and it labels the box at the same time.
Involve the youngest people you can
Teenagers are far more interested in this than anyone expects, and grandparents answer them more openly than they answer anybody. If there is a fourteen-year-old in the family, give them the fourth list above and a phone.
Keep reading
Or let Rosie sit down with them.
She asks these, listens, and asks the ones that come from their answers.
30-day free trial. No credit card to begin.