How to interview
your grandparents.

Better equipment than you might expect, because their voice matters as much as their words (see how to save family voices). The Oral History Society is blunt: if a recorder costs £20, it is unlikely to make audible recordings, so buy the best you can for your budget. For one-to-one interviews indoors, it says the best external microphone is a small tie-clip or lapel mic, and the recorder should save uncompressed PCM WAV files at 44.1kHz or 48kHz, 16-bit.

Phones are the sticking point. The British Library and the Oral History Society don’t recommend them, because most phones record severely compressed audio, keeping as little as a twentieth of the original data, and because phones are easily lost or stolen. If a phone is all you have, use it rather than lose the story, and copy the file somewhere safe the same day.

Do a one-minute test first and play it back on headphones, to catch a humming fridge or a ticking clock you stopped hearing years ago.

For questions to bring, see questions to ask your grandparents, with sets for each decade from rationing to Decimal Day.

You can, but treat it as second best. In its remote recording advice, written during the pandemic, the Oral History Society notes that oral historians have traditionally favoured face-to-face interviews and discouraged remote ones. If distance leaves no choice, it advises against the recording buttons built into video-call apps, which tend to make poor-quality files. Better is a ‘double-ender’, where each person’s audio is recorded at their own end, ideally with external microphones and both of you wearing headphones.

For a quick phone call, an iPhone can help. Apple says that in some countries and regions you can record a call with one other person. Both of you hear an audio notice that the call is being recorded, and the recording is saved to a Call Recordings folder in the Notes app, with a transcript in some languages. It isn’t available in the European Union, and Apple’s own advice is to make sure the other person is willing to be recorded. Ask first, every time.

Who can listen, and to what. The Oral History Society recommends a Joint Statement of Intent: a short form that sets out the purpose of the interview, who owns the copyright and any restrictions on access. It strongly recommends that you both fill it in after the recording is complete, and that a copy stays with the recording at all times. The Society publishes a sample for family researchers on its website.

Talk about the awkward parts too. If a family secret might come up, the Society suggests discussing in advance how you will handle it. Agree whether the recording stays with close family, can go to cousins, or can ever go online. If you plan to share it beyond the family, read the Society’s guide, ‘Is your oral history legal and ethical?’. Nothing here is legal advice.

If older recordings of them turn up on tape, see how to digitise cassette tapes. For everyday ways to catch stories outside a formal interview, see how to record family stories.

A planned interview is an occasion, and plenty of stories come out in smaller moments. Between visits, you can send your grandparents one question at a time from the Ancestorii app. There are 46 ready-made questions in 10 chapters, such as ‘Picture Sunday dinner when you were growing up. What was it like?’, or you can write your own. They answer in the free iPhone or Android app, you get an email when they do, and the answer becomes a memory in your family’s private feed, where a cousin can add their own version of the same moment. See how family questions work.

You can also add short clips from the interview as voice notes on the memory or album photo they belong to. Ancestorii converts voice notes to M4A so they play on any phone, which is one more reason to keep the full WAV file in your own backups. Only the people you invite into your family space can see or hear any of it. If your grandparents don’t use a smartphone, ask the question in person and add their answer yourself.