Questions to ask your grandparents that get real stories.
Ask about something specific: a kitchen, a first job, a day they still remember. "What was your kitchen like when you were small?" gets a story, and "What was your childhood like?" usually gets "fine." Here are 50 to choose from. Three is plenty for one afternoon.
How to ask.
- Bring a photograph. "Who's this?" is the easiest question there is, and one picture can fill an hour.
- Ask if you can record. A phone on the table is fine. You'll want the voice later, not only the words.
- Then stop talking. Wait through the silence. The next thing they say is usually the good part.
- Ask "what happened next?" It works every time.
- Write down every name. A maiden name or a town can open a whole line of your family.
Fifty questions.
Growing up
- What was your kitchen like when you were small? Who was in it?
- What could you see from your bedroom window?
- What did your house smell like on a Sunday?
- Who did you get in trouble with, and what for?
- What did you do when you were bored?
- Which teacher do you still think about, and why?
- What chore did you hate most?
- Where did you go that you weren't supposed to?
- What did you want to be when you were ten?
- What did a treat look like when you were a child?
The people before them
- What do you remember about your grandparents' house?
- What did your mother's hands look like? What were they always doing?
- What did your father do when he came home at night?
- Who in the family could tell a story? Which one do you remember?
- Who did people say you took after?
- Is there someone nobody talked about? Why not?
- Where did your family come from before here, and why did they leave?
- What did your parents never tell you that you found out later?
- What was your mother's maiden name, and her mother's?
- Whose name did you get, and do you know why?
Work and money
- What was your first job, and what did it pay?
- What was the worst job you ever had?
- What did you buy with your first real paycheck?
- When was money tightest? What did you do?
- Who taught you to do what you did for a living?
- What's something you could fix that nobody fixes now?
Love and family
- How did you meet? Who spoke first?
- What did your parents think of the person you married?
- What do you remember about your wedding day that isn't in the photographs?
- Where was your first home together, and what was wrong with it?
- What do you remember about the day your first child was born?
- What did you get wrong as a parent that you can laugh about now?
- Who was the family peacemaker? Who started the arguments?
- What did your family do every holiday, without fail?
Hard times
- What's the hardest thing you ever got through? What got you through it?
- Who did you lose too early?
- Where were you when you heard the news that changed everything?
- Was there a time you had to start over?
- Who showed up for you when things were bad?
- What did you learn the hard way?
Ordinary things
- What did you eat that nobody makes anymore?
- What song takes you straight back? Where to?
- What's the first car you remember?
- What did you and your friends do on a Saturday night?
- What's the oldest thing in your house, and how did it get there?
To finish
- What do you want your great-grandchildren to know about you?
- What did you think your life would be, and what was it?
- Who do you wish I could have known?
- What's a story you've never told me?
- What should I have asked you that I didn't?
If there's nobody left to ask.
A lot of what they'd have told you is still written down. An old obituary names parents, brothers and sisters, and a census record shows who lived in the house.
Or just ask.
Tell Ancestral Fire one name, and it reads your tree, searches FamilySearch Family Tree once you connect it, and tells you what it found, with the source behind each fact. A real answer:
How am I descended from him?
Your tree shows Patrick Kennedy as your great-grandfather: his son Patrick Joseph Kennedy was your grandfather, whose son Joseph Patrick Kennedy was your father.
From the Kennedy family's published tree, asked as John F. Kennedy.
See a whole conversation on How it works, or what it finds in one family: The Kennedy family tree, from Wexford to Dallas.