8 Tips for Gathering Your Family History

Before her mother passed away, Elizabeth Keating wanted to learn more about her family history. Through several interviews, she gathered information from her mom about their relatives and the family tree.

“But then, after she passed in 2014, I realized I’d asked her all the wrong questions,” Keating recalls.

“She had a whole life before my siblings and I came along. What was her childhood like? What was it like growing up in her time? I wanted to know my mother as a person rather than as a mother.”

Like Keating, we may be familiar with our grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles in their familial roles. We create images of our relatives based on their presence at family events. We might be well-versed in their oft-repeated anecdotes.

Yet we may not really know who they are beyond their relationships to us.

In particular, we probably don’t know much about their experiences as younger people — the stories that helped shape who they became.

Keating’s experience highlights a fact of life: If we don’t take the opportunity to learn about our elders, their memories and knowledge will be lost when they leave us.

On a lighter note, the time we spend getting to know our elders can be enjoyable for both parties.

Asking questions and listening offers them the gift of being truly seen and heard. And as older people experience loneliness and isolation at higher rates, our attention may be the most valuable gift we can offer.

“Older people can get lonely and feel their knowledge isn’t important to anyone,” Keating says. “If you really want to make an older person feel valued and more a part of things today, ask them about their experiences and the details of their past.”

Even if we’re motivated to learn our elders’ stories, it can be difficult to get started. We may not know when or how to begin, what sorts of questions to ask, or how to handle the challenges of emotion, memory, and understanding that arise.

Keating, a professor emeritus of anthro­pology at the University of Texas at Austin, adds that younger people may feel uncomfortable asking personal questions of their elders, especially if they’ve never interviewed someone before. Yet the longer we wait, the more we risk losing our opportunity.

While mourning the loss of her mother, Keating was inspired to help others learn their elders’ stories before it’s too late. She details the strategies she developed in her book The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations.

In the book, she also describes a project in which her undergraduate students used the techniques to interview their grandparents, and she reflects on how the interviews helped them foster a deeper connection with their older relatives.

The following tips can help you do the same.

8 Tips for Gathering Your Elders’ Stories

1) Begin now. Unless your elder is currently navigating an acute health crisis or loss, there’s no point in putting off the process, says Keating.

Even memory issues may not be much of a barrier. She notes that age-related memory loss is more likely to affect short-term memory than long-term memory. “People who are having these issues usually can still remember their past quite well.”

2) Choose the format carefully. Keating recommends conducting in-person interviews whenever possible. The technical aspects of a Zoom connection may be challenging for people who aren’t digital natives. And, even with tech-savvy elders, screens can present a barrier to the immediacy and intimacy of the conversation.

But if a virtual connection is your only option with far-flung elders, so be it. The challenges are worth the trouble.

Whether you meet in person or online, use some type of digital recording to capture the conversation so you don’t have to take notes and break eye contact. “If you want a written record,” Keating says, “there’s so much great transcription software out there that it’s much easier than it used to be to go from recording to text.”

3) Open with easy questions. “Start with ‘Where and when were you born? Is there a family story about your birth, or about your name? And what were your favorite toys, hobbies, and books?’ Simple ones like that,” Keating advises.

4) Move to concrete description. Encourage elders to describe physical environments from their early life. Keating says that this is one of the most powerful ways to move the conversation forward.

“Try to learn what their sensory environment was like: what the rooms in their houses looked and felt like, what they saw out of their window as a child when they woke up in the morning,” she suggests.

Such description often unearths a treasure trove of recovered memories and stories. “These concrete questions almost always lead to them remembering things they thought they’d forgotten, and things they never would’ve told you because they seem too ordinary.”

5) Use objects. Sharing photos, articles of clothing, awards, and other meaningful objects can prompt memories associated with them.

6) Show your attention and respect. Apply the principles of active listening, which include staying fully present, maintaining eye contact, and focusing on listening to understand.

Keating recommends occasionally repeating what you’ve just heard — “So you spent your summers at the lake,” for example — to show that you are paying respectful attention. This strategy can also inspire additional memories or details. (Find more tips for improving your listening skills at “5 Tips to Become a Better Listener.”)

7) Let your ­relative lead. While Keating ­acknowledges that follow-up questions are a valuable tool, she cautions interviewers to avoid unintentionally steering the conversation. This is especially important when difficult or disturbing memories emerge, such as a death or divorce.

“In those moments of emotion, the best thing to do is to just sit quietly and let the person experience them, rather than rushing through them as if the feelings are embarrassing,” she advises. “Let the elder determine how much they want to say. And there’s a lot you can do and say to show compassion as a listener: ‘That must have been difficult for you.’”

8) Don’t be afraid of silences. “I tell my students to tolerate a seven-second silence,” Keating says. “It may take your elder a bit of time to remember, and being patient in this way shows the elder that they are in charge of the conversation.”

Like the interviews themselves, the lapse between anecdotes may be uncomfortable at first. We don’t often linger in stillness and waiting. But slowing down is the point. These interviews are about hearing our elders’ stories as they want to share them.

And as we take a pause from regular life to hear about our loved ones’ pasts, we can allow ourselves to cherish this moment in the present with them — after all, it may become a chapter in our own elder story someday.

This article originally appeared as “Keeping Family History Alive” in the September/October 2026 issue of Experience Life.