General questions get general answers: *what was your childhood like* produces *we were poor but we were happy*, and then a silence. These 34 questions about love and marriage are specific enough to open your grandmother up. This is where the four-minute version people tell at parties lives. The questions below are the ones that get underneath it. Grandparents are often the easiest people to interview and the ones with the least time. Both of those are reasons to start this weekend.

Questions to ask

34 questions to ask about love and marriage

Before you start

34 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 love and marriage 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 34 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, grandfather, mother, father, husband or wife 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.

Meeting

  • Where exactly were you, and what were you doing?
  • What did you notice first?
  • What did you think was going to happen?
  • Who spoke first?
  • Did you tell anyone that night?

Courting

  • Where did you go?
  • What did you talk about?
  • What did your family think?
  • When did you know?
  • Was there anyone else it might have been?

Deciding

  • Who asked, and how?
  • Were you certain?
  • What did you promise each other that wasn't in the ceremony?
  • Who was against it?
  • What did you expect married life to be?

The day

  • What do you actually remember, as opposed to what's in the photographs?
  • What went wrong?
  • Who was there that isn't any more?
  • What did you wear, and who chose it?
  • What did you eat?

The long middle

  • What was the first year like, honestly?
  • What did you argue about?
  • When was it hardest?
  • What did you learn to leave alone?
  • What did you do together that nobody else knew about?

What it became

  • How did it change after children, or without them?
  • What did you become good at together?
  • When did you feel closest?
  • What did you nearly lose?
  • What did you forgive?

Looking back

  • What would you tell a couple starting out?
  • What do you wish you'd said?
  • What was the best year?
  • What did they teach you about yourself?

When they stop talking

Do not fill the gap. Say 'take your time' and wait. If they change the subject, let them — and note where they stopped, because that is usually where the important thing is.

What Your Book Pro does here

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.

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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