Everything here is free, and some of it means you will not need me.

Guide one · The twelve questions that actually work

For interviewing a parent or grandparent. Most people open with “tell me about your childhood,” which produces a summary, and summaries are useless. These twelve produce scenes.

1. Describe the kitchen. Where was the table, where did each person sit, what was on the walls?
2. What did the house sound like at six in the morning?
3. What did your father’s hands look like? What did they do all day?
4. What was the first thing you ever bought with your own money?
5. Who in the family did people not talk about, and what did you work out later?
6. Where did you sit in church, and who sat behind you?
7. Tell me about a Sunday. Not a special one. An ordinary one, start to finish.
8. What is something you believed then that you do not believe now?
9. When did you know you were going to marry them? What was actually happening in the room?
10. What was the worst year, and what got you through it — specifically, not generally?
11. What do you think your mother wanted that she never got?
12. What is the thing you have never told anybody, that you would be willing to have written down?

How to use them. Ninety minutes maximum. Record it — a phone on the table is fine. Ask one question and then be quiet; the good material comes after the pause you are tempted to fill. Do not correct their dates in the moment. If they repeat a story you have heard two hundred times, let them tell it again and pay close attention to what has changed, because that is where the truth usually is.

Question twelve is not for the first sitting. Ask it on the third, or never.

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Guide two · Twenty questions for the oldest member of your congregation

For churches, guilds and anniversary committees. Give this to two volunteers and a recorder and you will have done more for your congregation’s memory in a month than the minute book has in fifty years.

1. How did you come to this church? Not why you stayed — how you first walked in.
2. Who was the minister then, and what was he actually like?
3. Describe the building as it was. What has been changed, moved, or thrown out?
4. Where did you sit, and who sat around you?
5. What did a Sunday morning cost a family in this congregation — in time, in money, in clothes?
6. Who cleaned the church? Who cooked the funerals? Name them.
7. What was the building fund like from where you were standing?
8. Tell me about a funeral you remember.
9. Tell me about a wedding you remember.
10. What happened the year the congregation nearly split, or did?
11. Who left, and did anyone go after them?
12. What did the women’s group do that the board never knew about?
13. What did this church do for somebody in trouble? Give me one instance.
14. What did it fail to do?
15. What was sung, and who chose it, and who complained?
16. What changed when the new hymnals came in?
17. Which families were here then and are not now — and what became of them?
18. What is in this building that nobody knows the origin of any more?
19. If this congregation closed tomorrow, what should not be lost?
20. Who else should we be talking to, and how much time do we have?

Practical notes. Two people, not one — one asks, one takes notes on names and dates so the recording does not have to be re-listened to. Ninety minutes, once, with a second sitting offered. Get written permission at the end, in a sentence, signed; you will need it later and it is very difficult to obtain afterwards. Label the file the same day with the full name and the date, because interview3.m4a is worth almost nothing in fifteen years.

Question twenty is the important one. Ask it every single time.