How to Interview Living Relatives About Family Stories

I have a nineteen-second voice memo of my grandfather laughing, and it is worth more to me than every document I’ve ever found on FamilySearch. Getting it took one phone call and a little nerve. Here’s how to sit down with your oldest relatives, ask questions that unlock real stories, and save what they tell you before it’s gone.

Updated August 2026 · 13 min read

The week after my grandfather’s funeral, I opened the box of papers my aunt had saved from his desk and realized, with a sinking feeling, that I knew almost nothing about him. I knew the facts — born in Provo in 1931, served in the Navy, raised seven kids on a mechanic’s salary. But I couldn’t tell you what his mother was like. I couldn’t tell you why he left the farm, or what he was like as a young dad, or what he thought about in his last years. The facts survived him. The stories did not, except for the few scraps people swapped in the church cultural hall after the service, half of which I’d never heard before and never would again.

Here’s what stung: for the last six years of his life, I lived forty minutes away. I could have asked. I meant to ask. I kept thinking there would be a better time — a holiday when things were calmer, a summer when I wasn’t so busy. There wasn’t. If you’ve ever felt that particular ache, the one that mixes grief with the words “I meant to,” this article is for you. And if your parents, grandparents, or great-aunts are still living, I want to say the thing plainly: the single most urgent family history task in your life right now is not scanning photos or building your tree. It’s pressing record with the oldest people in your family, this year, while they can still tell you what the photos mean.

I’ve since interviewed my other grandparents, both of my parents, my wife’s grandmother, and a great-uncle who turns ninety-one this fall. Some of those conversations went beautifully and some were awkward for the first ten minutes, and a few of them produced the kind of stories that make a whole family cry laughing at Thanksgiving. What follows is everything I wish someone had told me before I started — how to get a yes, what to ask, what to record with, and what to do with the stories afterward so they outlive your phone.

Why the Oldest Generation Comes First

When people start doing family history, the natural instinct is to start with the dead: census records, headstones, the famous ancestor two centuries back. That work matters, and there’s a real thrill in it. But notice the difference in the supply chain. The census record from 1880 will still be available in 2030. Your grandmother’s memory of her mother will not. Every one of us is, without quite realizing it, the librarian of a collection that is closing soon.

There’s a second reason to start with the living, and it’s gentler: the stories you capture become the on-ramp for everyone else in the family. My teenage niece does not care about a pedigree chart. She cares a great deal about the audio of her great-grandmother describing how she skipped school in 1946 to see the circus train come through town. One of those two artifacts made her ask to see the other. Stories are how the next generation learns to love people they never met — and loving them is what eventually sends a teenager to the temple with a family name card in hand.

So the order of operations, in my experience, is simple. Interview the oldest living relatives first. Then the next-oldest. The documents can wait; they’re patient. People aren’t.

Getting a Yes Without Making It Feel Like an Interrogation

The biggest mistake I made early on was the framing. “Can I interview you?” sounds like a job application or a news segment, and it makes people nervous — suddenly they’re worried about being interesting, about saying something wrong, about being recorded saying it. A brother in our ward told me his mother refused for years because she insisted she had “nothing worth recording.” She had raised nine children on a sheep farm. Nothing worth recording.

What works better is smaller and more specific. Instead of asking for an interview, ask for help with one question: “Grandma, I was telling the kids about the house on Center Street and realized I don’t know how you and Grandpa ended up there. Could I come by Saturday and hear that story?” One story, one visit, a clear reason. Almost nobody says no to being asked about one thing they know and you don’t. And here’s the secret: the one story never stays one story. It opens doors to five more, and at the end of the visit you say, “That was wonderful — can we do this again?” Now you have a standing arrangement without ever having used the scary word.

A few things that help the ask land:

• Name who it’s for. “I want my kids to know what you were like” is a reason people respond to. It reframes the recording from scrutiny to gift.
• Be upfront about the recorder. Never record secretly. Say, “I’d love to save this in your actual voice so the grandkids can hear it someday — is it alright if I record on my phone while we talk?” Nearly everyone says yes, and most forget the phone exists within ten minutes.
• Offer an easy out. “If we get into anything you’d rather keep private, just say so and it stays between us.” Paradoxically, promising privacy makes people share more.
• Let them pick the place. Their kitchen table beats your living room every time. People tell stories best where they feel most themselves.

Recording With Just Your Phone

You do not need equipment. The phone in your pocket, running its built-in voice memo app, produces audio that is completely adequate for family storytelling. I’ve recorded on iPhones and Androids, in kitchens and on porches, and the only technical failure I ever had was my own fault — I set the phone on a table where a refrigerator compressor hummed loud enough to ride underneath every word. Lesson learned, cheaply.

The practical setup takes ninety seconds: silence your notifications, set the phone on the table between you, screen down, about an arm’s length from the person talking. That’s it. If you want to get fancy, start each recording by stating the date, the place, and who’s in the room — “October 12, 2026, Aunt Colleen’s kitchen in Sandy, talking with Colleen about her childhood” — because in ten years you will not remember, and neither will anyone else.

Why audio usually beats video

Everyone’s first instinct is video, and I understand it — you want to see their face. But after doing both, I reach for audio almost every time, for one reason: video makes people perform. The moment a camera points at someone, they sit up straighter, smooth their hair, watch their words, and give you the polite public version of the story. Audio is invisible. Set a voice memo running on the table and within minutes you’re getting the real voice — the pauses, the laugh in the middle of a sentence, the way they say “oh, heavens” when they remember something they hadn’t thought of in fifty years.

There’s also a listening truth: your family will actually listen to audio. A ninety-minute video of Grandma talking is daunting; a forty-minute audio file plays in the car on the way to the lake house. Video has its place — if your grandfather wants to show you how his father tied a particular fishing knot, or your grandmother wants to walk through the old photo album on camera pointing at faces, take the video. But for the storytelling itself, give people the freedom of not being watched.

Set the phone on the table and forget it. The best family stories are told to a person, not performed for a camera.

Questions That Unlock Stories, Not Dates

The classic interview mistake is asking the family-history-chart questions: when were you born, where did you go to school, what year did you get married. You’ll get answers — flat, thirty-second answers that sound like a form being filled out. Dates and places are what you look up. What you want from a living person is the texture that no record holds.

The questions that work aim at the senses and the ordinary. Not “tell me about your childhood” — too big, it produces a summary — but questions small and specific enough that the memory answers before the person has time to edit it. Some of my best:

• “What did your kitchen smell like when you were growing up?”
• “What did your dad do in the first ten minutes after he got home from work?”
• “What did you do on summer nights when you were twelve?”
• “What’s the first thing you remember buying with your own money?”
• “Who was your best friend in second grade, and what did you two do together?”
• “What did Sunday afternoons look like at your house?”
• “What’s something your mother used to say all the time?”
• “Tell me about the house you lived in when you were eight — walk me through the front door.”

That last one is pure gold. Ask someone to walk you through their childhood home and they will narrate for half an hour without a prompt — the smell of the entryway, the couch nobody was allowed to sit on, the drawer where the candy was hidden. The house is a memory palace they built without trying, and every room has stories stored in it.

Notice what all of these have in common: they can be answered with a scene instead of a fact. A scene is what you want. “My dad hung his hat on the third hook, washed his hands at the kitchen sink even though there was a bathroom ten feet away, and asked my mother one question: ‘Well, what did you get into today?'” — that sentence from my great-uncle taught me more about my great-grandfather than the entire paper trail on him. That man died in 1962. There is no other source for that sentence on Earth.

Photos and Objects: The Best Interviewers You Didn’t Pay

If you bring one thing to the interview besides your phone, bring a photo. Old photographs are story machines — hand someone a picture of themselves at nineteen and they will tell you who took it, what happened that day, what the car in the background was, and where the person on the left ended up. I’ve watched an aunt who insisted she “didn’t remember much” talk for ninety minutes straight, one photo at a time.

The technique is simple. Before the visit, gather five to ten photos — old prints, scans on a tablet, whatever you have — spread across the person’s life, not just one era. Lay the first one down and ask the easiest question in the world: “Tell me about this one.” Then follow where it goes. If you’re not sure which photos to use, pick ones with puzzles in them: a person you can’t identify, a building you don’t recognize, an occasion nobody’s wearing the expected clothes for. Puzzles invite explanation, and explanation is story.

Objects work the same way. Ask if they still have their mother’s recipe box, their father’s tools, the quilt, the letter jacket, the missionary scriptures. Then ask to see it. People narrate objects. My wife’s grandmother pulled out a flour-sack towel her mother had embroidered and told us, for the first time any of us had heard it, about the winter her mother took in mending because the crop had failed. That story now exists in three places: her memory, our recording, and the FamilySearch Memories entry we uploaded afterward. Two of those will outlast her.

The Art of Staying Quiet

This is the skill that separates a good interview from a great one, and it is genuinely hard: when the story takes an unexpected turn, let it go. Your question list is not the boss of the conversation. If you ask about the kitchen smells and your grandfather detours into the day his brother came home from Korea, do not steer back to the kitchen. The detour is the interview. The question list gave you the kitchen; the kitchen was only ever a door.

Practically, this means three habits. First, leave silences alone. When someone pauses, the instinct is to rescue the moment with the next question. Don’t. Count five slow seconds in your head. Older storytellers often pause because they’re deciding whether to tell you the real version — and the silence is where the real version gets permission to come out. Second, follow up on emotion, not chronology. If their voice changes on some detail, that’s the detail: “You smiled when you mentioned your cousin Ray — what were you two like together?” Third, reflect back instead of moving on. “So the whole family slept in one room that winter?” invites them to keep going; the next item on your list invites them to stop.

And accept that some sessions wander. I’ve had interviews that never answered my prepared questions at all and produced better material than the ones that did. You’re not extracting data. You’re keeping company with someone’s memories, and you take what they give you, gratefully, in the order they give it.

When the Memories Are Tender or Painful

If you do this long enough, the stories will eventually touch something hard — a baby who died, a divorce, the war, a family rift, poverty that still carries shame eighty years later. You need a plan for those moments before you’re in one, because you’ll have about two seconds to get it right.

The plan is mostly restraint. Do not rush to comfort and do not rush past it. If your grandmother’s eyes fill when she mentions her sister who died young, the right move is quiet and simple: “We can skip this, or you can tell me about her — whatever you want.” Then let her choose. You’ll be surprised how often people choose to tell. Being trusted with the hard story is an honor, and for many older people it’s a relief — they’ve carried it alone for decades because nobody ever asked. But the choice must be theirs, every time, and a tearful “I’d rather not” is a complete answer that deserves an immediate, warm change of subject.

One more boundary worth stating: if a painful story involves other living people, talk with your relative about how it should be shared before you share it. Some stories get recorded for the family archive but not posted publicly for twenty years. That’s a legitimate and respectful arrangement. The goal is preservation, not exposure — and the distinction is worth keeping clear, the same way a personal journal can hold things meant only for certain readers.

The Logistics That Make It Actually Work

None of this is complicated, but the details decide whether you get a rich session or a tired, distracted one. Here’s the checklist I run through before every interview:

• Pick a quiet room. Kitchens and dens beat living rooms with televisions. Turn off the TV and the radio, close the window if there’s a leaf blower outside, and beware the refrigerator hum — move away from it if you can. Background noise is the one technical problem you can’t fix later.
• Keep sessions to about forty-five minutes. Storytelling is genuinely tiring for older people. Forty-five focused minutes beats two fading hours, and a short, good session makes them eager for the next one. End while they’re still enjoying it.
• Bring a sibling or cousin. A second person who shares the memories will prompt stories you’d never think to ask about — “Mom, tell her about the night the goat got in the house” — and the conversation between the two of them is often the best material of the day. One sibling is ideal; a whole crowd turns it back into a performance.
• Schedule around their energy. Mid-morning is golden for most older folks — rested, fed, not yet tired. Avoid late afternoons and the hour after meals.
• Do a ten-second sound check. Record yourself saying a sentence, play it back with headphones or just your ear to the speaker, confirm it’s capturing clearly. Then start for real.
• Charge your phone and clear storage first. A voice memo that dies at minute thirty because of a full phone is a special kind of heartbreak. Ask me how I know.
• Plan to come back. One session is an introduction; three sessions is a life. The second visit is always better than the first, because now they trust the process and they’ve been remembering things all week, saving them up for you.

If the relative lives far away, don’t wait for the next visit — do it by video call, with a grandchild or neighbor nearby to help them with the technology. A slightly fuzzy recording made this month is worth infinitely more than the pristine interview you were planning for next summer.

Afterward: Making the Stories Outlive Your Phone

The interview is only half the job. A voice memo called “New Recording 14” on your phone is not preservation — it’s a single point of failure waiting for a software update. Here’s what I do with every session, usually within a week while it’s fresh.

Transcribe the best parts

Transcription is work, but it multiplies the value of everything you recorded. Audio is wonderful for the people who knew the voice; text is what the great-grandchildren will actually read. You don’t need to transcribe every word — I transcribe the stories themselves and skip the small talk, keeping the speaker’s own phrasing, including the “well” and “you see” and the sentences that wander, because that is what their voice sounds like. If the session is long, speech-to-text tools can produce a rough draft you then clean up by ear. Budget the time: an hour of audio is a few evenings of light editing, and it’s worth every one of them.

Share the files with the family now

Don’t wait until the project is “done.” After each interview, I send the audio file and the transcript to siblings, cousins, and the relative themselves — my great-uncle wept hearing his own session back, then asked for a copy to give his kids. Sharing immediately does three things: it gets the stories into many hands (and many backups), it lets family members catch errors and add details while the teller is still here to confirm them, and it tends to produce volunteers. Every time I’ve shared a recording, at least one cousin has said “I want to do this with Dad.”

Upload to FamilySearch Memories

This is the step that makes it permanent, and it’s easier than most people think. FamilySearch Memories lets you attach photos, documents, stories, and audio files directly to a person’s page in the Family Tree — so the recording of your grandmother isn’t just on your phone, it’s attached to her, findable by every descendant and cousin who ever looks her up. Upload the audio file, write or paste the transcript as a story, tag the right person, and add the photos you used as prompts. If you’re newer to FamilySearch and want a walkthrough of the basics, our guide to getting started with FamilySearch covers the account setup and navigation.

One honest caution: memories attached to living people work differently than those attached to deceased ancestors — privacy settings apply, and some families prefer to attach certain sensitive stories to the person’s page only after they’ve passed. For the warm and wonderful stories, though, there’s no reason to wait. The Church’s overview of family history describes this work as turning hearts to our fathers and mothers, and I’ve found that phrase is not poetry. It’s a literal description of what happens when a teenager hears her great-grandmother’s laugh for the first time.

And if the interview surfaces physical treasures — the photo album, the letters, the recipe box — that’s your next project, and we’ve written up how to preserve and digitize family photos so they survive the move, the flood, and the well-meaning cleanup.

Start This Month, With One Question

I still think about that box of papers from my grandfather’s desk. I can’t get his stories back; that door is closed. But because of what his loss taught me, I now have hours of my grandmother describing her wedding during a wartime gas shortage, my father explaining why he chose his trade over the one his father wanted for him, and my great-uncle doing impressions of relatives who died before I was born. Those files are backed up, transcribed, shared with forty cousins, and attached to the right names in Family Tree. When my kids are old enough to wonder who these people were, they won’t have to wonder. They’ll be able to hear them.

You don’t need a plan, a kit, or a free weekend. You need one phone call: “Grandma, I’ve been thinking about the house on Center Street. Could I come by Saturday and hear about it?” Bring your charged phone, one old photo, and your curiosity. Ask one small question. Then stay quiet, and let the door open.

This article reflects personal experience and study, not an official statement of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. External resources referenced in the text: FamilySearch Memories and the family history topic at ChurchofJesusChrist.org. Internal links point to other articles on this site. Examples of family members and interviews are composites drawn from common experience, shared to illustrate the methods described.