Questions to ask your grandfather
Start with work and tools, not feelings. "What did your hands do all day at your first job?" gets an answer from a man who says he has nothing to tell. "What are you proudest of?" gets a shrug. These are questions from the MemoriesBox interview, free to use with any recorder.
How to use this list
Three or four questions is a session. The second column is the part that matters, because the first answer is nearly always short and the story is in the one after it.
Men of this generation, in most families, answer questions about themselves in one of two ways: with a fact, or with a joke. Neither is a refusal. A fact is an offer of a subject, so ask what surrounded it. A joke is an offer of a mood, so laugh and then ask the straight follow-up in the same breath, as if the joke had been an answer. Fight either one and you lose the afternoon.
The average age at which people become grandparents for the first time is 50, and grandparents spend about $2,562 a year on their grandchildren (AARP Grandparents Today, 2018, n=2,654). Most families have decades of him and use none of them, because there is no obvious week to start.
Ask about places, objects and work first. Never open with feelings.
Start here
| Ask | Then ask |
|---|---|
| What did your hands do all day at your first job? | What did that do to them by Friday? |
| What tools were in the house, and whose were they? | What were you not allowed to touch, and did you touch it? |
| How did you get to work? | Who did you travel with, and what did you talk about? |
| What did you eat at work, and where? | Who did you sit with? |
| What was the first machine in the house everybody wanted to use? | Who decided who got to use it? |
| Which door did you come into the house by? | What was the first thing you saw when it opened? |
The middle of the conversation
Work, money, and the first week
| Ask | Then ask |
|---|---|
| What was the first job you were paid for? | What did you get wrong in the first week? |
| What did you earn, and what did it buy? | What did you spend it on that you did not tell your parents about? |
| Who taught you the job? | What did he say that you still repeat? |
| Which job did you stay in longest? | What was the reason you did not leave? |
| Was there a job you wanted and did not get? | What would that life have looked like? |
| Who did you work with that you still think about? | What happened to him? |
Tools, engines and things that were his
| Ask | Then ask |
|---|---|
| Which tool have you owned longest? | Where is it now? |
| Who taught you to drive? | What was the car, and what was wrong with it? |
| What did you fix yourself that you would pay somebody to do now? | How long did it take you the first time? |
| What did you build that is still standing? | Who helped? |
| What was the most you ever spent on one thing? | Did you tell anyone what it cost? |
His father
Usually the hardest ground and always the most valuable. Ask it in the third session, not the first.
| Ask | Then ask |
|---|---|
| What was your father like when you were nine? | What time did he leave the house, and what time did he come back? |
| What did he do when he was angry? | What did you do? |
| What did the two of you do together, if anything? | Whose idea was it? |
| What did he never talk about? | Did you ever find out why? |
| What did he teach you that you still use? | Did you ever tell him that? |
Service, if there was any
If he was conscripted or served, ask about the ordinary parts — the food, the boots, the boredom, the men — rather than the fighting. The fighting is either the thing he will not discuss or the thing he has told a hundred times, and both are dead ends on a first pass. There is a fuller list at questions about war and service.
| Ask | Then ask |
|---|---|
| What did they feed you? | What did you eat when you could get something better? |
| Who did you share a room with? | Where is he now? |
| What was the most boring day like? | What did everybody do to get through it? |
| What did you learn to do there that you never used again? | Show me how it went. |
Being young, and being a young father
| Ask | Then ask |
|---|---|
| What did you do on a Saturday night at twenty? | Who did you go with, and what did it cost? |
| Where were you standing when you first saw her? | What did you think was going to happen next? |
| What was the flat like when the first baby came? | What did you do about money that year? |
| What were you like as a father then, honestly? | What would you do differently? |
| What did you do on a Sunday, once there were children? | Was that your idea or hers? |
Questions to save for later
Ask these when he starts telling you things you did not ask for. Not before.
| Ask | Then ask |
|---|---|
| What were you afraid of, that you did not say at the time? | Who else knew? |
| Which friend do you miss most? | When did you last see him? |
| Was there a year you would rather not talk about? | You do not have to say what happened. Which year was it? |
| What do you know about this family that nobody else knows? | Do you want that kept until after you are gone? |
| Is there anybody you should have thanked and did not? | What would you say to him now? |
The question that usually works when nothing else does
What did your hands do all day?
Ask a man what his job was and you get a job title, which is a closed answer and usually a boring one. Ask what his hands did and you get the day: the machine, the cold, the weight of it, the smell of the oil, the man on the next bench, what time the tea came round, and what his back was like by Thursday.
It works because it does not ask him to have been important. It asks him to describe work, which is a thing men of that generation are entirely comfortable doing and are almost never invited to do. It also produces demonstrations — he will show you the movement, and the showing loosens the talking. And it goes somewhere: after the hands come the tools, and after the tools comes whoever taught him.
If he says there's nothing to tell
He will. It is not modesty exactly, and it is not refusal. It is a reasonable response to a question that was too large, and the fix is a smaller question, not an argument about whether his life was interesting.
Go to the shed. Ask what was in it, what was on the shelf above the bench, and what he was keeping that jar of screws for. Ask what he had to do that people do not have to do any more. Both are answerable by a man who is certain he has nothing to say, and both start him off without him noticing. Each kind of deflection, including the joking, has its own counter-move on what to ask when they say there's nothing to tell.
Questions people ask
What's a good first question to ask my grandfather?
Ask about work or tools. "What did your hands do all day at your first job?" or "what was in your father's shed?" Both are concrete, neither asks him to assess his own life, and both lead directly to the people who taught him.
How do I get him to talk about the war?
Ask about the ordinary parts first: the food, the boots, who he shared a room with, the most boring day. Men who will not discuss combat will talk for an hour about the rations and the men, and if he wants to go further he will do it himself.
He turns everything into a joke. What do I do?
Laugh, then ask the straight follow-up immediately: "who taught you that one?" or "that's the funny version, what was the boring version?" Take the joke as evidence rather than as an obstacle. Note which subject the jokes cluster around, and come back to it in the car rather than at the table.
Should I record him, or just take notes?
Record. What the family will want in twenty years is not the facts but the voice — the accent, the pauses, the way he says a name. A phone flat on the table is enough. Ask his permission on the recording itself and tell him who will hear it.
Related: Questions to ask your grandmother · When they say there's nothing to tell · Questions about war and service · Who agreed to be recorded · All the question pages
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