Questions to ask your mum.

Partly for you, and partly for whoever comes next. In a study reported in 2010, Emory University psychologists Robyn Fivush and Marshall Duke, with Jennifer Bohanek, asked 66 teenagers aged 14 to 16 twenty yes-or-no questions about their family, their ‘Do You Know’ scale, covering things like how their parents met and where they grew up. Teenagers who knew more showed higher emotional well-being and a stronger sense of identity, even after taking overall family functioning into account. The researchers cautioned that theirs was the only study to use the scale, so more research was needed.

There is a practical reason too: much of what your mum knows is written down nowhere. What her mother was like at your age, the hospital where you were born, the recipe she makes without measuring. Ask while you can still hear her tell it.

Start with places and people she can picture. Small, concrete questions get longer answers than big ones.

Your mum may be the only person left who remembers her mother as a young woman, and her gran as more than a name. Ask with something in front of you: a recipe card, a photo, a ring.

If your mum was working in the 1970s or 80s, she saw some of the biggest changes in women’s pay and rights from the inside. The Equal Pay Act 1970 gave employers five years to bring women’s pay into line with men doing ‘like work’, and it came into force on 29 December 1975, the same day as the Sex Discrimination Act, according to the University of Edinburgh’s Gender Equalities at Work project. Statutory Maternity Pay as it is paid today followed: most of its regulations came into operation on 6 April 1987.

Mothers in England and Wales are older than they used to be. The Office for National Statistics puts the average age of mothers at 31.1 in 2025, and says it has been rising since 1976. Asking how old she was, and how that felt among her friends, is an easy way in.

These are the stories nobody else can tell you.

Mothering Sunday falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent, so its date moves with Easter: in 2027 it is 7 March. The Church of England notes that in the 16th century the day was ‘less about mothers and more about church’, when people made a yearly journey to their ‘mother’ church, and that later, people working on farms and estates were given the day off to visit their mothers.

In the US, Mother’s Day is the second Sunday in May, 9 May in 2027: a Joint Resolution approved on 8 May 1914 set the date, and President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed it the next day.

A special day is a good excuse, but any quiet hour will do. These moments tend to help:

The Ancestorii app has 46 ready-made questions in 10 chapters, from Growing Up to Music & Hobbies, including ‘If you could sit down with yourself at twenty, what would you say?’. You can also write your own, so any question on this page will do.

Send one from the app as a time-limited link. Your mum answers in the free iPhone or Android app whenever it suits her, and you get an email when she does. Her answer is saved as a memory in your family’s private My Family feed, marked ‘In response to’ your question, and your brothers and sisters can add their own memory of the same moment beside it. See how family questions work. If she doesn’t use a smartphone, ask in person and add the answer yourself, with a voice note of her telling it.

The photo below is from our founder’s own family album.

If you’d like something to give her on Mothering Sunday, her answers and your family photos can go into a printed Memory Book: an A4 landscape hardcover of 24, 36 or 48 pages, from £44.99 plus delivery. It holds photos and written words. Standard delivery is quoted at 10 to 14 working days, so order at least three weeks ahead. For her parents’ generation, try our questions to ask your grandparents, and for the other side of the family, questions to ask your dad.