General questions get general answers: *what was your childhood like* produces *we were poor but we were happy*, and then a silence. These 35 questions about working life are specific enough to open your grandmother up. Work is the safest way into a life and often the richest. It carries the people, the place and the period without anyone having to be introspective. 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

35 questions to ask about working life

Before you start

35 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 working life 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 35 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.

The first proper job

  • How did you get it, and who helped?
  • What did you wear on the first day?
  • Who showed you what to do?
  • What did you not understand for the first six months?
  • What did it pay, and what did that buy?

The work itself

  • Describe an ordinary day, hour by hour.
  • What did your hands do?
  • What was the noise like?
  • What was the hardest part that nobody outside would understand?
  • What were you better at than the people around you?
  • What did you never get the hang of?

The people

  • Who taught you the most, and were they trying to?
  • Who did you not get on with, and why?
  • Who did you look after?
  • Who was funny?
  • Is there anyone you'd like to find again?

The hard part

  • What was the worst day?
  • Were you ever frightened at work?
  • What did you have to do that you didn't agree with?
  • When were you treated unfairly?
  • Did you ever nearly leave?

Change

  • What changed in the industry while you were in it?
  • What did you have to learn that hadn't existed?
  • What was lost when it changed?
  • Who couldn't adapt, and what happened to them?

What it cost and what it gave

  • What did the work take from the rest of your life?
  • What are you proud of that nobody knows about?
  • Did anyone ever thank you?
  • What would you have done instead, if you could?
  • Was it a good life?

Stopping

  • How did it end?
  • What was the last day like?
  • What did you miss immediately?
  • Who did you lose touch with?
  • What do you still dream about doing?

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.

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.

Record their answers

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