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Huminz Guide

100 Questions to Ask Your Parents About Their Life

Almost everyone means to sit down and ask properly. The reason it keeps not happening is that “tell me about your childhood” is an impossible question — nobody can answer it, and the conversation dies in the first minute. Specific questions are what work. Here are a hundred of them, grouped so you can take one era at a time.

On this page

  1. Three rules before you start
  2. Childhood and the house they grew up in — 14 questions
  3. School, and who they sat next to — 11
  4. First work, first wage — 11
  5. Courtship and marriage — 12
  6. Becoming a parent — 10
  7. Money, faith, politics and the harder ground — 12
  8. Questions to ask with an object in their hands — 10
  9. The people who are already gone — 10
  10. The last ten — 10

Three rules before you start

One session, one era. Forty-five minutes is plenty, and an hour is usually too much. Pick childhood, or the first job, or the year they married — and stay there. A conversation that wanders across sixty years produces anecdotes without any spine to hang them on.

Don’t correct them. If a date is wrong or the account differs from your own memory, let it stand and write down both versions later. Correcting someone mid-story is the fastest way to make them stop telling it, and the disagreement itself is often the most human thing you’ll record.

Record it. A phone on the table between you is enough. You will not remember the phrasing afterwards, and the phrasing is the part that sounds like them. Label the file the same day. There is a whole guide on doing that part well: how to record a relative telling their story.

If you only get one hour, ever: ask question 1, then 48, then 87, then 99. A beginning, a decision, a loss, and what they want remembered. That is a life in outline, and it is more than most families have written down.

Childhood and the house they grew up in

Start here. It’s the safest ground, the memories are the most vivid, and it warms up everything that follows.

  1. What is the earliest thing you can remember?
  2. Describe the kitchen of the house you grew up in. Where did everyone sit?
  3. Who else lived in the house — grandparents, lodgers, anyone passing through?
  4. Where did you sleep, and who did you share a room with?
  5. What did the house smell like on a Sunday?
  6. Was there a room you weren’t allowed into?
  7. What did your mother do all day? What did your father do all day?
  8. What did you eat in a normal week, and what appeared only at Christmas or a holiday?
  9. What were you frightened of as a child?
  10. Where did you play when nobody was watching you?
  11. What did you get in trouble for, and what happened when you did?
  12. Who was the first person outside the family you remember liking?
  13. What was the first thing you remember wanting badly and not getting?
  14. When did you first understand that your family was better off, or worse off, than someone else’s?

School, and who they sat next to

Ask for names. Names are what let a descendant find these people later.

  1. How did you get to school, and how long did it take?
  2. Who did you sit next to in your first year?
  3. Which teacher do you still remember, and why that one?
  4. What were you good at that nobody noticed?
  5. What were you made to do that you hated?
  6. Were you ever hit at school? What for?
  7. Who was your closest friend, and what happened to them?
  8. What did you want to be, at ten?
  9. When did you leave school, and whose decision was it?
  10. Was there anything you wanted to study and couldn’t?
  11. What did you learn outside school that mattered more than what you learned in it?

First work, first wage

People who say they have nothing interesting to tell will talk about work for an hour. Money makes memory precise.

  1. What was the first job you were paid for, and how old were you?
  2. What was your first wage, and what did you spend it on?
  3. Did you hand your pay packet over at home? How much did you keep?
  4. Describe the place you worked — the noise, the smell, who ran it.
  5. Who taught you how to do the job?
  6. What did you wear to work?
  7. Was there someone there you were afraid of?
  8. What was the hardest day’s work you ever did?
  9. Did you ever walk out, or get sacked?
  10. What work did you do that no longer exists?
  11. Which job are you proudest of, and did anyone ever say so at the time?

Courtship and marriage

Skip past the wedding photographs to the unglamorous detail — that’s where the story is.

  1. Where did you meet? Who spoke first?
  2. What did you think of them, honestly, that first time?
  3. Where did you go on an evening out, and what did it cost?
  4. Who disapproved?
  5. How did you know?
  6. Who proposed, and what was actually said?
  7. What do you remember about the wedding day that isn’t in the photographs?
  8. Where did you live first, and what was wrong with it?
  9. What did you argue about in the first year?
  10. Was there someone before, who mattered?
  11. What did you learn about marriage that nobody told you?
  12. What was the hardest decision the two of you made together?

Becoming a parent

If you are the child asking, be ready for answers about yourself that you did not expect.

  1. Where were you when you found out I was coming?
  2. What do you remember about the day I was born?
  3. How did you choose my name, and what else was on the list?
  4. What frightened you about having a child?
  5. What did you do differently from your own parents, on purpose?
  6. What did you end up doing exactly like them, despite yourself?
  7. What was the hardest year, and what made it hard?
  8. What do you think you got wrong?
  9. What do you wish you had spent more time doing?
  10. Which of us was most like you, and in what way?

Money, faith, politics and the harder ground

Leave these until a second or third session. Ask them once, accept whatever answer comes, and don’t push.

  1. Was there a time when money was genuinely tight? What did you do?
  2. What did you believe when you were twenty that you no longer believe?
  3. Did you go to church, synagogue or mosque? Did you want to?
  4. How did you vote, and did your parents vote the same way?
  5. Was there a public event that changed how you saw things?
  6. Did you serve, or were you called up? What do you remember of it?
  7. Was there a time you were afraid for your family’s safety?
  8. Did you ever have to leave somewhere you didn’t want to leave?
  9. Was there prejudice against you, or against someone you loved?
  10. What did you keep from us at the time, that we could know now?
  11. What was the worst year of your life, and who got you through it?
  12. Is there anything you have never told anyone?

Questions to ask with an object in their hands

The single most productive technique here. Someone with nothing to say about “the war” will talk for twenty minutes about the tin they kept their tobacco in. Bring photographs, a ring, a tool, a medal, a recipe card, a cutting.

  1. Who is in this photograph, left to right, and who took it?
  2. What happened an hour after this was taken?
  3. Who is missing from this picture, and why?
  4. Whose ring was this before it was yours?
  5. Who taught you to use this?
  6. Why have you kept this particular thing?
  7. What was this house like inside?
  8. Whose handwriting is this?
  9. Where was this, exactly — the street, not just the town?
  10. What would you want kept if you could only keep one of these?

The people who are already gone

These are the questions that become unanswerable first. Ask them early.

  1. Tell me about your mother, as a person rather than as your mother.
  2. Tell me about your father the same way.
  3. What did your grandparents do, and where were they born?
  4. Where did the family come from before that?
  5. Which relative was the family storyteller?
  6. Was there a relative nobody spoke about?
  7. Who died too young, and how did the family carry it?
  8. What did your parents say about their own childhoods?
  9. Is there a family story you suspect isn’t true?
  10. Whose voice do you still hear?

The last ten

Ask these at the end of a session, when the talking has already loosened up.

  1. What are you proudest of?
  2. What was the best decade of your life?
  3. What has been the hardest thing you have had to accept?
  4. What did you give up that you don’t regret?
  5. What did you give up that you do?
  6. What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, knowing she wouldn’t take it?
  7. What do you miss that no longer exists?
  8. Who should we have asked about all this, and didn’t?
  9. What do you want your grandchildren to know about you?
  10. What should be written down before it’s lost?

What to do with the answers

A recording nobody transcribes and a notebook nobody opens are both better than nothing, but neither is a story. The step that turns an interview into something a family will actually read is putting each answer where it belongs in time.

The method we recommend is in the companion guide: lay down the dated milestones first, then write each memory as its own short chapter. An afternoon of questions usually produces three or four chapters’ worth of material, and the answers that don’t fit anywhere are often the ones worth keeping on their own.

Read: How to Write a Life Story →
Read: How to Write Your Mother’s or Father’s Life Story →

From huminz.com/guides/questions-to-ask-your-parents — a hundred questions for the conversation most families mean to have.

Keep the answers somewhere they’ll survive

Huminz holds the recording, the photograph and the written memory in one place, each attached to the year it belongs to — so a grandchild can follow the whole life, in a book, on a map, or as a slideshow at a family gathering.

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Taking these to a kitchen table? Print this page — the header, the navigation and the rest of the furniture drop away, and you get the questions on paper.