Most people know they should record their parents and do not know what to ask, so the conversation stays general and nothing gets said. These are the questions that open people up: specific, concrete, and grouped by relationship and by period of life. Tick the ones you want and take them with you.
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Questions to ask before it is too late
Take the questions with you
Tick the ones that fit and we'll email you a formatted sheet you can print or read from a phone — plus the one-page guide on recording and what to do when someone becomes upset.
Why general questions fail
What was your childhood like? produces oh, we were poor but we were happy, and then a silence.
It is too large to answer. There is no way in, so people reach for the summary they have told before — and a summary is the one thing that is no use in a book.
What did the kitchen smell like on a Sunday? produces a story. So does who had a car in your street? and what did you do when it rained? Specific, sensory, small. The big things arrive on their own, sideways, once someone is talking.
How the sets are organised
By relationship — mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, parent, grandparent, partner, sibling — because you ask a grandmother differently from a brother, and the permission you have is different.
And by period of life — childhood, growing up, working life, love and marriage, war and service, faith, later life, migration.
Each set opens with a short before you start section: what this relationship makes easier, what it makes harder, and what to be careful of.
Questions that touch difficult territory are marked. That is not a warning to avoid them — the difficult ones are frequently what the person has been waiting to be asked — but you should choose to ask rather than arrive at them by accident.
When someone becomes upset
It will happen, and it is not a failure.
Put the recorder down. Stay. Do not fill the silence — the pause after something hard is often where the rest of it comes.
And say, plainly, that you can stop, and mean it. Whether they will talk to you again is worth more than any single answer.
Most people, asked afterwards, are glad they were asked. That is the consistent finding of everyone who does this work, and it is worth holding on to when you are nervous about starting.
What to do with what you record
Your Book Pro is a British book-writing platform. You bring a book — an idea, a folder of notes, half a draft, or a finished manuscript written somewhere else — and it gives you the editorial process a publisher would run: a plan, structured feedback, a simulated beta read, a line edit, a proofread, a cover, a blurb and a print-ready file. You can type it, upload it or speak it. The tools sit in one place and work on the same manuscript, so the feedback compounds instead of arriving as twelve disconnected opinions.
The practical path from a recording to a book: Transcription turns the audio into clean verbatim with speaker labels — every word kept, filler removed, nothing rewritten. Themes from Bulk Audio reads across all your recordings at once and tells you what the material is actually about, which is the question you cannot answer by listening back. Light Edit does the readability pass without changing your mother's words into someone else's.
You can also type it, or upload notes and letters, and mix all three in one manuscript.
These question sets are free to use and free to download, with no account. They exist because the recording is the part that cannot be done later, and it should not be behind anything.
Upload a recording
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Email me the questionsQuestions people ask
- How many questions should I ask in one session?
- Ten to fifteen is plenty for an hour. The follow-ups matter more than the list — when something opens up, stay there rather than moving on.
- What if they don't want to be recorded?
- Don't call it an interview. Say you'd like to record so you don't have to keep stopping to write things down, put the phone somewhere unremarkable, and have a conversation.
- Should I ask about the difficult things?
- Usually yes, and later rather than first. The difficult questions are marked in every set. Most people are glad to be asked; almost nobody volunteers it unprompted.
- How long should a session be?
- Sixty to ninety minutes. Stop before they want to stop — that is what guarantees a second session, and the second is nearly always better.
- Can I use these for a podcast or an oral history project?
- Yes. They're free to use and free to download, and libraries, hospices and family history groups are welcome to use them.