By the end of this piece you will have a recording of an older relative talking about their life in their own voice, labelled and copied so it can be found again. You need their agreement, a quiet room, a recorder and a short list of questions.
The advice below comes from oral-history organisations, and the Oral History Association (OHA) frames its guidelines around oral history projects, of one interview or many. Take the parts that suit a family conversation.
Do this in 10 minutes
- Ask them. The UK’s Oral History Society suggests approaching someone by personal contact rather than by letter, often by telephone, and calling it a chat about the past rather than an “interview”.
- Say what you will do with the recording and who will hear it.
- Agree a day, a rough length and a place. The Society calls the person’s own home by far the best setting, because they will be more relaxed there.
- Write down five open questions. StoryCorps recommends sharing your questions ahead of time with the person you are recording.
Agree the ground rules first
The OHA recommends a conversation before any recording that covers why you are doing this, what topics you have in mind, how it will be recorded, and how the recording may be used and kept. It also suggests finding out what they would like to be asked.
The OHA’s guide for people being interviewed says they are free to not answer a question, take a break from recording or end the interview, and that the interviewer should not pressure them to change their mind. The same guide says they can make changes before a recording is shared. Tell your relative so.
For oral history projects, the OHA’s guidelines call for documenting the person’s informed consent and securing a signed release form, and for following the policy of any archive that will hold the recording. If you hope to publish the recording or give it to an archive, read that page and talk to the archive first. This is general information, not legal advice. For questions about rights or permissions in a recording you plan to share publicly, ask a qualified legal adviser.
Prepare questions, not a script
The Oral History Society advises grouping topics in a logical order, often chronological: family background, childhood home, school, work, later family life. It also says not to over-prepare and not to use a script.
- Ask open questions. StoryCorps suggests avoiding yes-or-no questions in favour of phrasing such as “Tell me about”.
- Do not suggest the answer. The Oral History Society’s example is to ask someone to describe their childhood rather than asking in a way that assumes it was poor and unhappy.
StoryCorps publishes question lists by category, including grandparents, parents and growing up, and encourages you to come up with your own. Some examples written for this guide:
- Tell me about the house you grew up in.
- What sounds or smells take you straight back to being small?
- Looking back, which decision are you most glad you made?
The last two borrow StoryCorps’ ideas of asking about the senses and ending with reflective questions.
To tidy your list, you could paste it into an AI chat assistant with a prompt like this one, then check what comes back.
Here are my rough questions for a conversation with an older relative about
their life. Put them in chronological order, reword any yes-or-no or leading
questions as open ones, and remove duplicates. Do not add new questions.
[paste your questions]Leave out names and private family details. Then print the list or copy it onto paper.
Set up the room and the recorder
The Oral History Society recommends a room that is not on a busy road, with radios and televisions off if possible and mobile phones switched off. It also says one-to-one is best, since a third person can inhibit the speaker.
On equipment, the Society recommends recorders that can save uncompressed WAV files and says you will generally get better results with an external microphone than a built-in one. As of October 2026, its equipment page states that the British Library and the Oral History Society do not recommend smartphones for recording oral history interviews. Its reasons include compressed audio, phones being easily lost or stolen, and file formats that may be hard to open later. For a family keepsake you may decide the phone you own is good enough.
The OHA recommends a recorded lead-in giving both names, the full date, the place in general terms and the subject.
During the conversation
- Start with a few warm-up questions, as StoryCorps suggests, such as where they were born.
- Wait for a pause before your next question, and respond with nods and smiles rather than words, per the Oral History Society. It also says not to interrupt or contradict.
- Ask follow-ups. The OHA describes follow-up questions as a way to seek clarification, elaboration and reflection.
- Ask who people were. StoryCorps suggests setting up context for names and places that future listeners may not know.
When you finish, the Oral History Society says not to rush away: take time to thank them and to talk about yourself.
Label it and make copies
The OHA advises moving the recording off the device as soon as possible and keeping copies in different physical locations. The Oral History Society warns that a single hard drive is not a reliable long-term store.
For file names and backups, you could borrow from the US National Archives. Its page is about scanned family papers and photographs and does not cover sound recordings, so applying it to an audio file is this guide’s suggestion, not the Archives’ advice. The page recommends file names without spaces, punctuation or symbols, a note of who, what, where and when, and three copies on two kinds of media with one kept off-site. The Oral History Society adds that you should, at minimum, write a summary of the main topics and stories in order.
Check the result
If you used AI on your questions, read them aloud. Cut any that sound stiff or that assume an answer.
If you later use AI to transcribe or summarise the recording, the Oral History Society’s guidance is to check a tool’s terms and whether it keeps your data, and to check any AI transcript carefully against the original audio.
Common snags
- The talk wanders. StoryCorps advises going with it and returning to your question later.
- A subject upsets them. Stop or move on. The OHA’s participant guide says they are not required to discuss topics that distress them.
- You run out of time. The Oral History Society says a full life story can take two or three sessions. Book another.
Do this next
Phone the relative you have in mind today, tell them you would like to hear about their life, and agree a date.