If you’ve found this article chances are you’ve decided to record your family’s oral history. We think this is one of the best gifts you can give yourself, your descendants and your elders. What gift could be greater than cherished stories of your elders passed down through generation after generation of your family to come? We want to congratulate you on starting this journey, we believe you will find it moving, surprising, and deeply rewarding.
So now you’re probably asking yourself, “How do I do this? How do I get the best interview? What’s the right format?” This is such an important piece of your history--you want to get it just right.
We’re here to help. Through lots of trial and error in our work at Origin, we’ve developed a method to capture your family oral history in a way that creates not just a factual record, but a piece of your relative’s essence. Using these steps you will create a recording that will allow you to feel like your mom or dad, grandma or grandpa or other loved one is with you wherever you listen to it, and it will allow your descendants to feel like they are getting to meet their ancestor. Here are the 5 essential steps to get the perfect interview:
Step 1: Set Up a Safe, Well-Defined Context for the Interview
The goal of your interview process is to allow your relative’s personality to shine through. In service of that goal, you want them to feel safe and relaxed, so they can ‘be themselves’ when you record. Setting their expectations and letting them feel in control of the process will allow them to relax into the interview and get out of their own editing mind.
Make sure your relative understands why you and the rest of your family want their stories collected and saved, what it means to you, and get them buy into the meaningfulness of this process.
Explain that you are doing an audio recording because it’s the easiest way to get the story. Afterwards, you may choose to transcribe it, perhaps edit the transcript and turn it into a book. But everything starts with a conversation.
Explain that if they say anything they don’t want repeated down the generations, it can easily be deleted. This allows them to say whatever comes to mind without worrying if it’s on or off topic. Some of the most moving and interesting moments we’ve captured have been a distant, even unrelated association from the question that preceded them.
After you’ve explained all this, ask your family member if they have any questions and concerns, so you’re both on the same page, and so they feel comfortable and excited to dive in. This step lays the foundation for everything else so make sure to give it the time and attention it deserves.
Step 2: Ask Specific Questions, not Vague Ones
In the interview process, the goal of your questions is to inspire memories to transport your relative back to the time they are telling you about. To this end, you want to ask questions that put them back in a moment in time, rather than questions that make them think about their past generally.
Thus, it’s important to avoid asking vague or overly broad questions, such as:
“What was your childhood like?”
“What was school like for you?
“Tell me about your relationship with your mother and father…”
Instead, ask questions that elicit a specific memory, person or scene in their mind, such as:
What is your earliest memory?
What was your very first day of school like?
What was your favorite type of food your mother cooked for you, and why did you love it?
What was the craziest thing your pet ever did?
Do you remember your first crush?
Step 3: Focus on the 5 Senses: Sight, Sound, Touch, Smell, and Taste
Your inclination when interviewing parents and other relatives is to ask about “BIG THINGS”. Such as, “What was your wedding day like?” etc.
There’s a time and place for these big questions. However, we’ve found they’re not the best to get the interview started. Instead, we’ve found that questions focused on sensory memories get the interview off to the best start:
What did your home smell like? (The sense of smell is most deeply tied to our memories, so if you can get your loved one to remember scents their memories will become all the more vivid for them.)
What colors were in the scenery where you grew up?
What toys did you play with, and what did they feel like in your hands?
What did your first pet feel like as you pet him/her?
These may not seem like the most earth-shattering questions, but you’ll be amazed at how quickly they bring your relative back to detailed reminiscence of their early days.
Step 4: Keep it Conversational
Try to keep the interview as conversational as possible. This can take a little practice, but remember the goal is to capture the personality of your relative as much as the facts of their life. Preparation is essential, but if you’re just reading through a checklist of questions, the interview will be robotic and you won’t connect emotionally.
Instead, try “riffing” off what your family member says. For example, if your mother says, “My first school dance, I was picked up by my classmate Jimmy,” you could ask:
“What kind of car was Jimmy driving?”
“How did he ask you to the dance? And why did you say yes to him?”
“What was your favorite song to dance to then, and what was it like dancing to it?”
Let your natural curiosity guide you. Try to follow what most excites your subject and make their face light up and the voice fill out with excitement. You probably wouldn’t have prepared those follow-on questions in a list. But if you rigidly went on to the next question in a list, without asking these conversational follow-ons, think of how much amazing detail, and how many great stories, you’d be missing!
Step 5: Give it Space and Time
Be sure to give your elder lots of time to breathe and reminisce. When they finish one thought, don’t jump right in to the next question. Resist the temptation to fill silence with words. We all are afraid of dead air, but take a deep breath and have faith. Often the best answers come when you give your subject time to reflect. Let them fill the space first. See if the pause feels pregnant or like a true pause.
You won’t be able to fit all your relative’s great life memories into one interview! You can see, with all the conversational riffing and follow-on questions that open up from each anecdote and detail your family member shares, you can spend an hour reminiscing about just a few key life events in their lives.
In order to paint a full picture of your loved one’s life, you’ll want to be ready to conduct multiple interviews over time. We’ve found that the most useful cadence is one interview per week, at a regular time. It’s helpful to give the interviewee some sense of what you intend to ask about in the next interview so that they have space and time to reflect on that period of their life.
We Applaud You!
The stories and wisdom of our elders need to be preserved for future generations. By taking this step to create a family oral history, you are not only creating cherished heirlooms and mementos for your family--you’re also making history (or recording it, to be exact)!
The 5 steps above should be more than enough to get you started recording great family history interviews.
And if you decide you’d like professional help to create your interviews, we’re here for you as well.
Happy interviewing!
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