How to Interview Your Family Members Like an Oral Historian

Updated August 5

In researching her new book, Oakland resident Nicole Wong interviewed her parents while playing games of Mahjong with them.

“I want to go on the record and say there must have been a time that I’ve beaten them,” Wong said.

Her website, The Mahjong Project — and later book titled Mahjong: House Rules from Across the Asian Diaspora — originally set out to document the rules that her family played by. And while playing, Wong would pepper her parents with questions: Why did you score this move this way? How do you pronounce this word? How do you spell that? Her parents would pull out vintage Mahjong sets they kept in their closet. Her mother sifted through old photos, recalling the memories behind the images to her.

The stories then expanded to the wider diaspora. Wong spoke to a variety of people — from ages 25 to 80 — about how their family played Mahjong.

“I was playing with a group of people and we all just kind of naturally started talking about family history,” she said. “It’s just fascinating — different parts of Chinese American history just sitting around at the table.”

This interview process ultimately evolved into a form of oral history, the process of preserving original recorded interviews of someone’s personal recollections. This format was particularly fitting for her topic of Mahjong, Wong said, “because the way that most people learn how to play is through oral explanation … Stories about the person who taught you, or who taught the teacher, come out.”

The power of oral history

Wong started this project in the role of daughter. But as a new mother herself, she realized she’d become “the person who holds the information now” — and that time was of the essence to capture it from her parents.

“This is a really interesting and valuable time to be talking to that generation above us, where we still can gather those stories,” she said.

Before writing, most knowledge was “through storytelling,” said Roger Eardley-Pryor, an oral historian with UC Berkeley’s Oral History Center at the Bancroft Library. People held their stories in their memories and passed them down intergenerationally, but “once the technology developed in the 20th century to actually record and store those stories, oral history began to evolve more in an academic context,” he said.

If you’re inspired to preserve family memories and community stories this way — whether you want to interview your grandfather, an aunt, a distant cousin or someone else you know — keep reading for expert advice on how to get started.

And if you’re looking for tips on how to preserve family documents and photos instead, take a look at our guide “How to Preserve Your Family History Like an Archivist.”

• Jump straight to: The technical aspects of recording family members, and what software to use

The urgency of getting started

Menlo Park’s Maggie MarkdaSilva said when people hear how her organization, Narrative Histories, helps record family stories, a common reaction is, “Oh, I am so sorry I didn’t find you before it was too late.”

This is proof that anyone who’s interested should start “sooner rather than later,” she said.

“Don’t worry that you don’t know what you’re doing,” MarkdaSilva said. “Anything you capture is going to be better than nothing [and] be so valuable to you later on, when your parents or grandparents have passed away.”

“It definitely feels intimidating,” Wong, who spent years writing The Mahjong Project, said. “In reality, you just got to start somewhere and start chipping away at it.”

And even if a wider oral history project doesn’t pan out, giving it a shot is also a chance for you to spend time with family members, she said. “It’s been just a really meaningful way to talk to my parents and to my aunts and uncles in a way that has felt really different,” she said.

To get you started, Eardley-Pryor recommended first thinking about the order of family members you want to interview.

“Do you want to start with the oldest person first, in the idea that they might be closer to passing on, and so you want to capture their memories most?” he said. Equally, if you choose to gather stories and questions from younger family members first, “when you interview that elder, you can ask them these things that everyone else in the family is interested in.”

However, you choose to get started, Eardley-Pryor said a good rule of thumb is to see your interviewees as collaborators from the get-go, and make sure you’re on the same page throughout about how the process will look and what you intend to do with the recordings.

“Oral history is both a very ethical process and a product,” Eardley-Pryor said. “The methodology used in it is collaborative. It is shared authority. It is something done in conjunction together.”

Put your subjects at ease 

“You, of course, would never want to do this against anyone’s will,” MarkdaSilva said — so make sure the person you want to interview actually wants to take part.

That said, many people can initially be hesitant when it comes to being interviewed, she said, with responses like “My life wasn’t that interesting,” or “No one really cares,” or “I’m shy.”

One of MarkdaSilva’s techniques in this case is to bring up young people in the family.

“I have found that once you say, ‘This is for your grandchildren. Could you please just do this for them?’ the elders warm up and they say, ‘Of course I will,’” she said. “Once they begin — oh my gosh, it’s such a great experience for them.”

Eardley-Pryor said you can also sit down with the subject in pre-interviews, like sharing what topics you want to talk about in the recording or look through old photo albums to kick-start memories.

This is also a good place to talk about what the interviewee is comfortable with — and what they don’t want to talk about. He said that oral history allows an interviewee the chance to tell “the stories that they want to tell.”

“Oral history is about deep listening and deep empathy and hearing stories and memories,” he said. “But [also] empowering a narrator to feel like they are in the driver’s seat, because they should be.”

The importance of doing your research first

Do your homework, MarkdaSilva said, and “learn as much about the person as you can before you start interviewing.”

In addition to a pre-interview, your research can be about the small details, like finding out what instrument your mom played in her band.

“The more you know already, the more engaging your questions are for the person being interviewed,” she said.

You could also research the historical milestones that took place during their earlier life, the events that “almost everybody remembers,” said MarkdaSilva, like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This helps “anchor” the subject’s story and puts it into context, she said.

Ask effective, open-ended questions — and be patient

You want to avoid questions that can be answered with a “yes” or a “no,” said Guneeta Singh Bhalla, executive director of the 1947 Partition Archive in Berkeley.

Singh Bhalla’s organization holds thousands of oral histories in its directory, and she recommends that you “ask questions in an open-ended manner, so that they can answer in their way.”

That said, MarkdaSilva said that some people may be intimidated by very broad questions, so asking a few specific questions can help people latch onto memories they have.

As for where to start, you could ask the interviewee about their grandparents or their oldest family memories, Eardley-Pryor said. These ideas are “a really nice starting point, because it takes the narrator a little bit out of themselves,” he said.

Other good starter questions include:

• When were you born? Where was that?
• What was the neighborhood you grew up in like?
• What was dinner time with your family like?
• How did you get to school?

Some questions to end your interview could include:

• What are some of the things you’re most proud of in life?
• What are the things that you are most grateful for in life?
• What are the main lessons you learned?
• What are things you hope for going forward — whether for your family, kids or the world?

In her “how to” section in The Mahjong Project, Wong advises that people should be patient when conducting interviews and give ample space and time for people to respond. Ask questions that “set the scene,” she recommended: “What was it like when? What do you remember from? Use the senses — what did it look like? What did it sound like?”

Be sure to let the subject do most of the talking during the interview and let them lead the interview by not disrupting their stream of consciousness, Wong said.

Stay present — especially when asking follow-up questions

Your speaker may have a memory that they might not find significant, but is nonetheless a meaningful observation of the time period they’re recalling.

Although you should, of course, be careful not to be too persistent or try to contradict their narrative, these types of follow-up questions will come to you if you stay present and engaged in the interview, MarkdaSilva said.

“If you’re thinking about your grocery list or what you’re going to have for dinner … you need to just stop the interview and come back another time,” she said.

Be aware of traumatic memories

Don’t let following a line of questioning lead you to accidentally push your subject’s boundaries, MarkdaSilva said.

“It’s important to know when to stop because of the importance of rapport and respect,” she said. “There are things people don’t want to talk about.”

The person you are interviewing may have lived through a major historical event or had a traumatic experience. These memories can arise in moments when it’s most unexpected, said Eardley-Pryor, who stressed the importance of outlining what’s on the table for discussion with your subject before starting the recording.