Questions to ask

36 questions to ask about growing up

General questions get general answers: *what was your childhood like* produces *we were poor but we were happy*, and then a silence. These 36 questions about growing up are specific enough to open your grandmother up. Adolescence is the period people most often summarise and least often describe. Specific questions about first jobs, first money and first freedoms break the summary. Grandparents are often the easiest people to interview and the ones with the least time. Both of those are reasons to start this weekend.

Before you start

36 questions in 7 groups. Pick eight or ten; do not try to get through them all.

  • Ask if you can record. Almost everyone says yes, and almost everyone forgets the recorder is there within ten minutes.
  • Sit beside them rather than opposite. It is easier to remember something difficult when nobody is watching your face.
  • Have a photograph to hand. A picture unlocks more than a question does.
  • Let silences run. The useful answer usually arrives about four seconds after you would normally rescue the pause.
  • Do not correct dates. Being wrong about the year is not the same as being wrong about the memory.
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Before you start

Most people ask your grandmother about growing up once, get three sentences, and never ask again. Not because there is nothing to say — because the question was too big. "What was it like?" is impossible to answer. The questions below are small on purpose: they ask for one thing at a time, and they ask for detail rather than summary, because detail is what memory actually stores.

There are 36 here, in 7 groups. Pick eight or ten. You will not get through them all in one sitting and you should not try.

The questions work the same whether you are asking grandmother, mother, father and yourself. What changes is not the question but how much they will say to you, so start with the group you think they will enjoy rather than the first one here.

Becoming yourself

  • When did you stop being a child, and what happened?
  • What did you start doing that your parents didn't like?
  • Who did you want to be like?
  • What music was yours, that the adults didn't understand?
  • What did you argue about at home?
  • When did you first feel grown up, and were you?

Friends

  • Who was your closest friend, and what happened to them?
  • Who did you fall out with, and was it ever mended?
  • What did you all do on a Friday night?
  • Who did your parents disapprove of?
  • What did you do that you'd never let your own children do?

Leaving school

  • Who decided what you'd do next?
  • What did you want to do that wasn't possible?
  • What was the last day like?
  • Did anyone tell you that you were clever?
  • What did you know about the world when you left?

First money

  • What was the first job, and what did it pay?
  • What did you buy with the first money that was yours?
  • Who taught you how to work?
  • What did you learn there that you still use?
  • Who was the first difficult person you had to handle?

First love

  • Who was first, and what happened?
  • What did you think love was going to be?
  • Who broke your heart?
  • What did your parents say?
  • Is there someone you still wonder about?

The world outside

  • What was happening in the world that you remember?
  • What frightened everyone that year?
  • What did you believe then that you don't now?
  • Who did you argue with about politics?
  • What changed that nobody saw coming?

Looking back

  • What were you certain about that you were wrong about?
  • Who should you have listened to?
  • What chance did you not take?
  • What did you get away with?
  • What do you know now that would have helped?

When they stop talking

Move to the next group and come back later. Often the answer arrives twenty minutes afterwards, unprompted, while they are making tea.

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These question sets are free to use and free to download, with no account. They are here because the recording is the part that cannot be done later, and it should not sit behind anything. When you have the recordings, Transcription turns them into clean verbatim and Themes from Bulk Audio finds what the material is actually about.

A professional oral historian at £150–£400 a day brings judgement about what to follow that a question list does not. What a list gives you is the courage to start, which is usually the actual obstacle.

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