Question pack
Questions to Ask Your Grandfather About His Life
Questions that get a grandfather talking about growing up, work and service, courting your grandmother, and a world that no longer exists.
A grandfather has usually told the same four stories so many times that the family stops asking. But those four stories are the polished ones, the rehearsed set. Underneath them is a whole life nobody has asked about in decades: the price of things, the names of workmates, what a Saturday was for.
The questions below are designed to get past the greatest hits. They ask about the ordinary days, because the ordinary days are what disappear when he's gone.
Growing up
- What was in your pockets when you were ten years old?
- How far away was school, and how did you get there in bad weather?
- What did your family raise, grow, or make at home?
- Who was the oldest person you knew as a child, and what did they talk about?
- How did you earn your first money, and what did you do with it?
- What was the best meal your mother put on the table?
Work, service, and skill
- What was your trade or line of work, and who taught it to you?
- If you served, where were you stationed, and who slept in the next bunk?
- What did a good day's work look like, start to finish?
- What's the best tool you ever owned, and where is it now?
- What did you build or fix that's still standing?
- What did you earn in a week back then, and what did rent cost?
Courtship and family
- Where did you first see Grandma, and what was she doing?
- How did you ask her to marry you, and where were you standing?
- What was your wedding day like — who came, what was served?
- What was the first home you two made together?
- How did you make ends meet in the lean years?
- What did a Saturday look like when your kids were young?
His world, then and now
- What did your town have then — the shops, the mill, the depot, the church?
- What's something every household had then that nobody has now?
- What could a dollar buy when you were a young man?
- What invention arrived in your lifetime and changed daily life the most?
- What do people worry about now that never crossed anyone's mind then?
- What's one thing that's still done exactly the way it used to be?
How to use these questions
Let him hold something while he talks: a tool, a medal, an old photograph, the watch. Objects are the best interviewers in the world, and a grandfather explaining what a thing is for will tell you the story around it without being asked. If you don't know what he's kept, "what's in that drawer?" is a fine opening question.
When one of the rehearsed stories starts, don't wave it off. Ask for the part that isn't in it: who else was there? What happened the next morning? And record him, even just on a phone face-down on the table. His exact words, in his voice, are the thing your kids will want.