Interviewing Relatives for Family History Research

Begin with a voice, not a form

Family history usually begins with paper: birth certificates, census returns, a bundle of letters in a biscuit tin. These give dates, places and lineages, but say little about how your grandmother sounded when she laughed, or what your grandfather did with his hands while he talked. Those details live in memory, and memory is most generous while the people who hold it can still share it. Interviewing relatives is not a formal process. It is a series of unhurried conversations, planned well enough that the good material has room to surface.

Prepare open questions rather than a questionnaire

A closed question earns a closed answer. "Did you enjoy school?" invites a yes or a no, and the conversation stalls there. "What do you remember about your first school?" opens a door, and people generally walk through it. Aim for prompts that ask for description, sequence or feeling, and group them loosely around three areas.

• Childhood: Where did you sleep as a child? What was on your bedroom wall? What did the street sound like early in the morning? Who looked after you when you were ill? What did you eat on a normal weekday, and what was different on a Sunday?
• Work: How did you travel to your first job? What did the building smell like? Who trained you, and what did they teach you that no one wrote down? What did you spend your first wages on? Was there a day you thought about leaving?
• Family traditions: What happened at Christmas that happened at no other time of year? Who sat where at the table, and why? Which recipes have survived, and which have quietly disappeared? What was said at family gatherings that everyone understood and no one explained?

Write perhaps fifteen or twenty questions, then treat them as a map rather than a script. The best material often arrives when you follow an unexpected turn instead of the next item on your list.

Set up the recording with care

Where possible, record the conversation. A smartphone voice recorder or a small digital device is perfectly adequate. Place it closer to your relative than to you, on a folded cloth or a coaster to soften table knocks, and test it for thirty seconds before you begin. Then check the file plays back. There is nothing more painful than discovering, an hour later, that you recorded silence.

• Ask permission first, and explain what you intend to do with the recording.
• Check battery level and available storage before you travel.
• Turn off the radio, the television and the washing machine.
• State the date, the place and both your names at the start of the file.
• Keep sessions to around forty-five minutes, and plan two or three rather than one long sitting.

Photographs are useful prompts. A shoebox of pictures on the table will often release memories that direct questions never reach.

Listen more than you talk

During the conversation, aim to speak for perhaps a fifth of the time. Use small prompts: "Tell me more about that." "What happened next?" "How did that feel at the time?" Silence is a tool rather than a failure. Count to five before filling a gap, because the second thought is usually the better one. Resist correcting dates or gently disputing a version of events. Accuracy can be checked later against records, but a challenged memory often closes down for good. If your relative becomes upset, pause the recording, make tea, and ask whether they would like to continue another day. Note the moment in your research log so you can return to it sensitively.

Transcribe the key passages while they are fresh

Transcribe within a day or two, while you can still hear the intonation and remember who was being discussed. You do not need a word-for-word record of everything. A rough verbatim of the strongest fifteen or twenty minutes is far more valuable than a polished transcript you never finish. Keep the hesitations, the repeated phrases and the old dialect words, because those are the texture of the voice. Check the spelling of every name and place with your relative rather than guessing. Timestamp the passages you might quote, and note anything that needs a follow-up question. Back the files up in three places, including one away from the house.

Shape the transcript into memoir

When you come to write, you are editing rather than transcribing. Keep your relative's own words for the moments that matter and set them in quotation marks, then write a short bridge of narration around them to explain who is speaking and what has just happened. Trim the repetitions that read awkwardly on the page, but leave the rhythm intact. Send a draft back to your relative, or to whoever holds the family memory now, and ask whether you have represented things fairly. A transcript with permission to quote is the beginning of a memoir; a transcript without it is a private document. Handle both with the same care you would give to a letter found in a tin.