Family interview questions are prompts a child uses to ask a relative about their life — a parent, a grandparent, an aunt, a neighbour who has always been around. The questions do the work: a good one produces a ten-minute story, a vague one produces "it was fine".
This is a page about the questions themselves and how to run the conversation. If you want a ready-made page for one specific person, the grandma and grandpa interviews are already written out.
Why most family interviews produce nothing
Because they open with the biggest possible question. "Tell me about your life", "what was it like growing up", "what are your happiest memories" — these are unanswerable. Faced with forty years and no starting point, most people say "oh, nothing special".
Small questions do not have that problem. Nobody has to summarise anything, so nobody freezes. And a small question almost always arrives with a large story attached to it, which is the trick: you are not asking for less, you are asking for a way in.
A question bank that works
Questions that date a childhood
What did you eat for breakfast? What was on the radio or television? What were you not allowed to do? How did you get to school? What did a comic or an ice cream cost? Children find prices genuinely shocking, and it makes the era real to them faster than any date would.
Questions about work
What was your first job and what did it pay? What was the worst job you ever had? Who taught you to do it? Did you ever want to do something else? The first-job question is reliable — everyone remembers it, and almost nobody has been asked about it in years.
Questions about decisions
How did you end up living here? What made you leave the last place? How did you meet? What nearly happened instead? These are the questions that surface the near-misses a family history depends on, and they are almost never in a template.
Questions that get a laugh
What is the most trouble you were ever in? What did you do that your parents never found out about? What was your worst haircut? These loosen a conversation that has gone formal, and they are the ones children want to ask anyway.
Questions worth ending on
What are you proud of? What would you tell me if I was about to make a mistake? What do you want us to remember? Ask these last, when the conversation has warmed up. Asked first, they get platitudes.
How to actually run it
- Let the child ask. The same question from a child and from an adult gets two different answers. Relatives deflect their own children and answer their grandchildren.
- Pick six questions, not twenty. An interview that gets through everything got through nothing.
- Ask "what happened next?" after every answer. One follow-up doubles the length of the story. If you remember nothing else, remember this.
- Leave the silences alone. A three-second pause feels endless and is almost always someone deciding whether to tell you something.
- Record the audio. Ask permission, put the phone face down, and forget about it. The page keeps the facts; the recording keeps the person.
- Write it in their words, not tidied up. "He was a right so-and-so" should not become "they did not get along".
- Stop before anyone is tired. Ending early means there will be a second one. Pushing on means there will not.
See the printable
This questionnaire gives you the questions already written out, with space for answers and a photo.
View the family questionnaire printable on Etsy — instant digital download.
Subjects to approach carefully
Most family interviews run into something difficult eventually, and it is better to have decided in advance how to handle it.
War, illness, a child who died, a marriage that ended, money that was lost, the reason a family left a country. These stories exist in almost every family, and they are often the most important ones. They are also not owed to anyone on a Sunday afternoon.
The workable approach is to leave the door open without pushing on it. "Is that something you want to talk about?" gives a clear way out, and people take it or they do not. If they do start, stop writing and listen — a child scribbling notes changes what someone is willing to say. Write it down afterwards.
And brief the child beforehand that some answers might be sad, and that this is normal. A child who is not warned can feel they did something wrong.
What to do with the answers
An interview that stays in a drawer was still worth doing, but there is more in it than that.
Put the pages together. Four relatives interviewed by four cousins is a book. One page is a page.
Attach a photograph to each. Not a recent one — a photograph from the period they described.
Transcribe the recording, or at least note the timestamps of the good parts. An unlabelled voice memo from 2026 will not be found in 2050.
Do it again in five years. The same questions to the same person produce different answers, and the differences are as interesting as the answers.
Frequently asked questions
What are good family interview questions for kids to ask?
Small, concrete ones: first job and what it paid, breakfast as a child, what you were not allowed to do, the first thing bought with your own money. Broad questions about "your life" get nothing.
How many questions should we ask?
Six, properly, rather than twenty in a hurry. Follow-ups matter more than the number of prompts.
What age can a child do this?
Five with an adult writing, seven or eight independently. Teenagers are often the best interviewers in a family.
Should we record it?
Yes, with permission. The written page keeps the facts and the recording keeps the voice, and the voice is what families miss.
Can this be used for a school family-history project?
Yes, and it is one of the better versions of that assignment — provided the questions do not assume a particular family shape.
What do I receive when I buy the printable?
A PDF, downloaded instantly and printed as often as you need. Nothing physical is shipped.
More family keepsake printables
This guide is part of our family keepsakes collection.
- All About My Grandma — a ready-made interview
- All About My Grandpa
- Family Memory Book
- Family Tree Printable
- Grandparents Day Printables
- Mother's Day Printables for Kids
- Father's Day Printables for Kids
Using it for a school project? See our school printables collection.