Prompts
50 questions to ask your grandparents
Most family history is lost because nobody asked. These are the questions that open people up — grouped so you can pick three and start.
Updated August 2026 · Ana by Rememora
A list of fifty questions is useless if you read it like a form. Pick three from one group, ask them on an ordinary phone call, and let the answers take you sideways. The good material is almost never in the answer to the question you asked — it is in the thing they mention on the way to it.
Childhood
- What is the first thing you can remember?
- What did your house smell like on a Sunday?
- Who were you closest to as a child, and what happened to them?
- What were you frightened of, and were you right to be?
- What did you get in trouble for most often?
- What did you and your friends do when there was nothing to do?
- What was school like on your worst day there?
- What did your parents argue about?
Family and where you come from
- What do you know about your own grandparents that nobody else in the family knows?
- Which relative was the family's difficult one, and why?
- Is there a story about our family that gets told wrong?
- What did your mother do that you still do?
- What did your father never talk about?
- Who in the family were you named after?
- What was lost — a house, a country, a language, a name?
Work
- What was your first job and what did it pay?
- What work were you actually proud of?
- Who taught you how to do something properly?
- Was there a job you wanted and never got?
- What did you do that no longer exists as a job?
- When did you first feel like an adult at work?
Love
- How did you meet?
- What did you think the first time you saw them?
- Who did you nearly marry instead?
- What did you argue about in the first year?
- What did nobody tell you about being married?
- What was the best day the two of you had that wasn't the wedding?
- When did you know you were in love — the moment, not the month?
Leaving and arriving
- What did you take with you when you left home?
- What was the first thing that shocked you about the new place?
- What did you miss that you couldn't explain to anyone there?
- How long was it before it felt like home?
- What language did you dream in?
- Would you do it again?
Food and the ordinary days
- What did your mother cook that nobody makes any more?
- Talk me through that recipe as if I'm standing next to you.
- What was a treat when you were small?
- What did a normal Tuesday look like when you were thirty?
- What music was on constantly in your twenties?
Hard things
- What was the worst year, and how did it end?
- What did you do when you were most afraid?
- Who did you lose too early?
- What did you forgive that you thought you couldn't?
- What still keeps you up?
Advice and the long view
- What do you know now that would have saved you ten years?
- What advice did you ignore, and were you right to?
- What are you proudest of that isn't a person?
- What do you want me to do with what you've told me?
- What would you like your great-grandchildren to know about you?
- Is there anything you've always wanted to say and never have?
Do it while you can, and record it
Written notes keep the facts and lose the person. What you will want in twenty years is the laugh in the middle of the sentence, the pause before the hard answer, the accent that is already fading out of the family. That only survives if the call itself survives.
Ana records a normal call with them in archival quality and keeps it in a private archive that stays yours. If you would rather do it yourself first, start here: how to record a phone call on iPhone.