The Questions You'll Wish You Asked
I ask this question at almost every oral history workshop I teach: if you could interview absolutely anyone — living or dead, famous or not — who would it be, and what would you ask them?
People have fun with this. Some say Harriet Tubman. Some say Julius Caesar or Genghis Khan or some other figure from ancient history. Someone almost always says Beyoncé.
But about ninety percent of the time, the answer is much quieter than that. My grandmother. My grandfather. My dad, before he got sick. An aunt who everyone says I remind them of, but who died before I really got to know her. And almost always, the answer comes with a particular kind of regret…I always meant to. I just never got around to it. I thought there would be more time.
So here's my challenge to you: if you could interview one family member who is still here — someone who carries stories about your family, your history, your community — who would it be? And what would you ask them?
Because the time, I promise, is now. And the good news is that you don't need to wait for someone like me to do it. Here's how to start.
Find the right space.
This is the mistake I see often, and it's an easy one to fix. Coffee shops, restaurants, and front porches with traffic roaring by are terrible places for recording. Ambient noise that your ear filters out naturally becomes a distracting wall of interference on an audio recording. Find a quiet room, close the door, turn off the TV, and silence your phone. A dining room or a home office with soft furnishings is ideal. The room itself is an important piece of your oral history set-up.
Use what you have — and know how to use it.
Your phone's Voice Memo app is genuinely capable of producing good recordings. The key thing most people don't know: the microphone needs to be much closer to your subject than feels natural, ideally within a foot or two, not across a coffee table. If you’re using your phone, a small investment in a recording app like Hindenburg, which shows you recording levels, combined with an external mic for your phone can make an incredible difference in audio quality, all for an investment of under $100. If you want to do more than one or two interviews, though, a dedicated digital recorder like a Zoom recorder and an inexpensive external microphone will be one more step up in audio quality without breaking the bank.
Ask questions that open doors, not questions that close them.
Yes/no questions are the enemy of oral history. You want questions that invite your subject to tell you a story, not just confirm a fact. The best questions are specific and sensory, or they ask someone to walk you through something they know deeply.
When I interviewed my father-in-law, Donald Lemoie, about Don's Lunch (his diner in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where he made clam cakes and chowder and fish and chips every Friday for a largely Catholic community that didn’t eat meat on Fridays) I asked him to walk me through how he made his fish and chips. He lit up. He told me exactly what most people get wrong, what kind of fish is the best fish for it, and how it ought to taste. It was a master class, and I got it on tape because I asked him to walk me through something he knew how to do better than almost anyone.
That's the "walk me through it" question, and it works for almost any skill, craft, or area of expertise your subject carries.
Know how to handle reluctance.
A lot of people (particularly women, and people from families where talking about yourself was considered immodest) will tell you their life isn't interesting enough to record. Don't argue with them. Instead, start with their ancestors. Ask about their grandmother, their grandfather, the family stories that got told at every Thanksgiving. People who resist talking about themselves will often open up easily when talking about the people they loved. Once they're warmed up and trust is established, their own stories tend to follow.
And always make clear that they are in control. They can decline any question. They will have a say in how the recording is preserved, shared, and used. Consent and trust are the foundation of a good oral history.
Save it. Back it up. Document it simply.
The most important thing you can do with your finished recording is make sure it survives. Save it to your hard drive, an external drive, and at least one cloud-based system like Google Drive, Dropbox, or iCloud. Having three copies of your file makes sure that you have enough backups that if one file gets accidentally deleted or becomes corrupted, you have others. And storing at least one off-site means that if the unthinkable happens (a house fire, a flood, your computer getting totally fried by a power surge), you don’t lose the family history you’ve worked so hard to preserve.
Then make a tape log (a term audio nerds still use even though most of us haven't touched physical tape in over twenty years). Play back the recording and jot down timestamps and a brief description every time the topic changes. This gives you a simple map of the interview without requiring a full transcription — you'll be able to find "the story about the summer job in 1962" in thirty seconds instead of laboriously scrubbing through ninety minutes of audio. And save copies of that document in all the places you’ve saved a copy of the audio file.
Saving backups and making a tape log are the foundations of creating an archive for your family’s story that will be useful and last and you can keep adding to it (and maybe expanding it to include other kinds of documents, transcripts, etc.) over time.
What if the person you wanted to record is already gone?
You still have options. Gather other family members and go through old photographs together. You'll be amazed at what surfaces when people are looking at images from the past. Interview the people who knew them best. Record the stories that got told at every family reunion, every holiday gathering — the ones everyone knows and laughs about. Those stories deserve to be preserved too, even secondhand. The goal is to capture what can still be captured, not to mourn what can't.
A few questions to get you started:
What did your grandmother's kitchen smell like?
Tell me the story of how you got your name.
Who was the elder in your family you most looked up to as a kid, and why?
When did you know your partner was “the one”?
Walk me through [something they do extraordinarily well].
What do you wish you'd known at the start of your career that you figured out along the way?
What do you want the next generation of your family to know about you — things they might never think to ask?
You don't need academic training to do this well. You just need a quiet room, a phone, and a willingness to ask a real question and then stop talking. The stories are there. They are waiting.
If you'd like help getting started — whether that means hiring me to conduct interviews for your family or consulting with you to make sure your own project gets off on the right foot — I'd love to talk. This is exactly the work Triangle Story Studio was built for.
I’ll also be teaching an online six-week course on using oral history to record your family history this summer. It’s run through Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies continuing education program and begins in July 2026. You can find out more and register here: https://rsvp.duke.edu/event/346d436a-ab81-49a7-9371-c159e7aa784b/summary
