Conducting oral history interviews with older relatives

Why older relatives' voices are worth capturing

Photographs give you faces, but they never give you the way somebody said your name, or how they laughed when they told a story against themselves. Once a relative's voice is gone, that particular accent, those turns of phrase, the rhythm of their speech, are gone with it. A single afternoon with a recorder can preserve a hundred small details that no document will ever hold: the name of the shop on the corner, the smell of the school cloakroom, the reason the family moved across the country in 1953.

Oral history isn't only about famous events. It's about ordinary life remembered in a particular way, in a particular voice, and it becomes more valuable with every passing year. It's worth doing sooner rather than later. Memory is not a fixed archive; it shifts and softens with time.

Preparing open questions in advance

Write your questions down before you visit, even if you barely glance at them. The aim is to ask things that need more than a yes or a no, and to let your relative take the story wherever it wants to go. If they drift off the point, that's often the most interesting part.

Photographs work beautifully as prompts. Take a small pile of family pictures along, spread them on the table, and ask who is in each one, where it was taken, and what happened next. Objects work too, though they can be difficult to part with, so asking about them in person is often better than borrowing them.

• Childhood: "What do you remember about the house you grew up in? Which room did you spend the most time in?"
• School and work: "Tell me about your first job. What did you actually do all day?"
• People: "What was your mother like? What did she say when she was cross?"
• Place: "What could you hear from your bedroom window at night?"
• Change: "What's the biggest difference between life now and when you were twenty?"
• Senses: "What did the kitchen smell like? What songs were playing?"

It's also kind to ask beforehand whether there are subjects they'd rather not talk about. Give them an easy way to say no, and don't press if they do.

Choosing a quiet space and a good time

Background noise is the enemy of a good recording, and it's much harder to fix afterwards than to avoid in the first place. Sit in a carpeted room away from the kitchen, the television and the road. Close the windows, turn off the radio, and switch off the phone rather than leaving it on vibrate. A ticking clock can be surprisingly loud on tape, so move it or stop it.

Timing matters as much as place. Choose a slot when your relative is usually alert and comfortable, often mid-morning or early afternoon, and keep sessions to around forty-five minutes to an hour. Offer a cup of tea, sit at a table rather than on a deep sofa, and place the recorder between you rather than on your lap. If they tire, stop. You can always come back another day, and a second visit is often more relaxed than the first.

Using a reliable recorder

A dedicated digital voice recorder usually gives the cleanest sound, but a smartphone will do a perfectly respectable job if you place it well and test it first. Whichever you use, learn it before the day, and check that you have space and power for a long session.

• Test the levels by recording thirty seconds of conversation, then listen back through headphones before you begin properly.
• Use the highest quality setting available, and record as an uncompressed or high bit-rate file.
• Keep a spare set of batteries or a charging cable in the bag, along with a notebook and pen.
• Say the date, the place and both your names at the start of the recording for your own future reference.
• Don't handle the recorder while it's running; rustling and tapping spoil more interviews than traffic does.

Listening well during the interview

The hardest part is staying quiet. Resist the urge to fill pauses, finish sentences or correct dates. Silence gives your relative room to think, and what arrives after a pause is often the detail you couldn't have asked for.

Ask one question at a time, follow up gently with "and then what happened?", and let them move around their own memories. Avoid interrupting to check facts or to say that you remember it differently; that conversation can happen later, off the record. Keep your own contributions brief, and if you notice your relative becoming upset, offer to pause the recording. They might want to carry on; they might want to stop altogether. Either is fine.

Afterwards: labelling, backing up and sharing

Label the files the same day, while the details are fresh: the person's name, the date, the place and who was present. Jot down a short index of names and places mentioned, because a recording without a note of who "Auntie Vi" was will be far less useful in twenty years.

Then back it up in at least two other places, on a computer and an external drive or cloud account. Make a copy for your relative to keep, and consider whether they'd be happy for the recording to be lodged with a local archive or family history society, which will look after it properly. Ask permission first, in writing if possible, and respect their answer.

Most of all, enjoy it. These afternoons are as much about the conversation as the file at the end of it, and your relative will often remember the chat far longer than the microphone.