Hub
Questions to ask before it is too late
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.
A separate free preview: Your free private family history Book Coach
A separate family history Book Coach preview: it helps shape a life-story book from one remembered story. It does not choose, write or produce the gift itself. A short private conversation, one question at a time, starting from one story you were told. By the end you should have a clearer sense of what the book is about, who it is for, the shape it wants to take, and where to start. It never writes a word for you.
A separate family history Book Coach preview: it helps shape a life-story book from one remembered story. It does not choose, write or produce the gift itself. It asks questions and gives you your own answers back. It does not write the book. You can copy or download the finished plan straight from the page, free and with no email needed.
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.
About Your Book Pro
Your Book Pro is a book-writing platform built in Britain. Start with an idea, notes, half a draft, a podcast, or a finished manuscript, and use our purpose-built AI tools for planning, feedback, editing, proofreading, cover designs, and to create print-ready files. Writing is totally free: you can type, upload or speak your book as much as you like, and use only the editing tools you need with Plus, or go unlimited with Pro.
Produce world-class drafts at the fraction of the cost of hiring a human editorial team.
Every account starts with 1,000 welcome credits, and a plain export of your own words is free.
Each guide says plainly when a person does the job better than AI. Guides on legal topics are general information, not legal advice.
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
Try the Book Coach — free, no account
Email me my free family history linkQuestions 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.