Questions to ask your parents about their lives

Many adult children know their parents well and know little of their lives before the children came along. These questions to ask your parents are for a mother or father who is well and enjoys telling stories, at a holiday table, a milestone birthday or an anniversary, when the family is together and there is time to listen. They are numbered and grouped by period of life, so the page can be printed and shared out, with each brother or sister taking a section.

For a parent who is ill, questions to ask a parent before they die is shorter and gentler. Questions to ask your grandparents reaches a generation further back and has a set for young children.

How to ask your parents about their lives

Smithsonian Education's guide to family interviews gives advice that holds for a parent as much as anyone. These are its steps, with two added for a family of brothers and sisters.

1. Choose the occasion and the sections. The table below matches each section to the occasion it suits.
2. Share the sections out. Let each brother or sister take one, so that each asks in their own way, and keep the rest for later visits.
3. Start with a story you have heard your parent tell. It is an easy way in, and it shows your parent that their stories are worth telling.
4. Ask about something particular. A question as broad as "tell me about your childhood" tends to bring back only names and dates, the guide warns. Ask about one room or one meal instead.
5. Bring photographs or an old album. Objects bring back memories that questions do not.
6. Follow up before moving on. Ask who was there, what year it was, what happened next and how it felt. Let your parent wander from the question, since the side roads often turn up what no list would think to ask.

A milestone birthday gives a reason to ask, and a recording of the answers can be given on the day; meaningful 80th birthday gifts suggests ways to give it.

Their childhood

Ask about the home your parent grew up in and the people in it. Small details, such as a rule they thought unfair or the smell of a kitchen, bring back the rest.

1. What did your father do when he came home in the evening?
2. What was your mother like when you were small, and what did she worry about?
3. Which room in your childhood home do you remember best, and what happened there?
4. What did your family do together on a day off?
5. Who were your neighbors, and which of them do you still think about?
6. What did you and your brothers and sisters fight about?
7. Which rule in your house did you think was unfair?
8. What smell or sound takes you straight back to being a child?
9. What did your parents do when you were sick?
10. Which family outing do you remember best, and why?
11. Apart from your parents, who in the family were you closest to?

Their teenage years

12. What were you like at fifteen?
13. Who were your friends, and where did you spend time together?
14. What did you and your parents argue about?
15. What music did you listen to, and what did your parents think of it?
16. What did you wear then that you would not wear now?
17. What did you do on a Saturday night, or on motzei Shabbos?
18. What was the most trouble you ever got into?
19. Who was your first crush?
20. At eighteen, what did you want your life to look like?
21. What were you good at that no one knew about?

School, yeshiva or seminary, and first jobs

22. Which school did you go to, and what was it known for?
23. Which teacher or rebbe shaped you most, and how?
24. If you went to yeshiva or seminary, where was it, and what was a day there like?
25. Who were your chavrusas or your closest friends there, and are you still in touch?
26. Did you go to college, and how did you choose what to study?
27. What was your first paid job, and who gave you your first real chance?
28. What did you learn in your first job that you still use?
29. Was there a job you wanted and did not get?
30. How did you settle on the work you did for most of your life?
31. Which friend from those years would you most like to see again?

Dating, shidduchim and marriage

32. How did you and Mom (or Dad) meet, and who made the introduction?
33. If it was a shidduch, who suggested it, and what did you each hear about the other first?
34. What did you do on your first date, and how did it go?
35. When did you know this was the person you would marry?
36. How did you tell your parents, and what did they say?
37. What do you remember of the engagement, the l'chaim or the vort?
38. Who stood under the chuppah with you, and what do you remember of the day?
39. What was hard about the first year of marriage?
40. What have you learned about marriage that you wish someone had told you?
41. What do the two of you still disagree about?

Raising a family, and questions about you

These are the questions to ask your parents about yourself. Only they remember you before you can, and most parents enjoy telling it.

42. What did you expect being a parent would be like, and what surprised you?
43. How did you choose our names, and who are we named after?
44. What was I like as a baby?
45. What did I do as a child that you still laugh about?
46. What did you worry about most when we were young?
47. What did you do differently from your own parents, on purpose?
48. Which of our family's traditions did you start, and which did you inherit?
49. What was the hardest time for the family while we were growing up, and how did you manage?
50. What do you think each of your children got from you?
51. Is there anything you wish you had told us when we were younger?

Work, money and the middle years

52. What are you proudest of in your working life?
53. What was the biggest risk you took, and how did it turn out?
54. How did you and Mom (or Dad) decide where to live?
55. How did the family manage money, and who handled it?
56. What did you give up for the family that we may not know about?
57. Who were your closest friends in those years, and how did you meet them?
58. What did you do in the community, in shul or as a volunteer?
59. Which year of your life would you gladly live again?

Your grandparents, as your parent knew them

Your parent's mother and father are your grandparents, and your parent is the bridge to them and to the generation before. These are the questions to ask your parents about family history, and the answers are the start of any family tree.

60. What were Grandma and Grandpa like while you were growing up, and how did they change as they grew older?
61. What was your mother's family name before she married, and what were your parents' Hebrew names?
62. Where were your parents born, and what did they tell you about their own parents?
63. Where did your grandparents come from, and when did they come to this country?
64. Did you know your grandparents, and what were they like?
65. Where did your father work, and what did he do there? And your mother?
66. Which relatives did your family see most, and which did they lose touch with?
67. Are there letters, papers or photographs from your parents that we should keep?
68. Is there a family story you were told as a child that you were never sure was true?
69. Who in the family would know more than you do?

Faith, minhagim and the family's ways

In frum families these questions explain why the household does things as it does, and the reasons are rarely written down. They work for any family that keeps a faith, with the words changed to fit.

70. Which minhagim did you keep from your father's home, and which from your mother's?
71. Do you know where each of those minhagim came from?
72. How long does the family wait between meat and milk, and who decided?
73. Which nusach did your father daven, and which shul did he belong to?
74. Was the family connected to a rebbe, and which one?
75. Which customs did you take on yourselves, and why?
76. How was Pesach kept in your parents' home, and what have you changed?
77. Which zemiros or tunes come from your father's side, and which from your mother's?
78. What did your parents teach you about tzedakah and about having guests?
79. Which rav did the family turn to with its questions, and what was he like?

When a parent says a custom came from their father's family, ask which town that family lived in, and write the town down beside the custom. A custom can point to a country: questions to ask your grandparents shows how the hours between meat and milk differ between German, Dutch and Sephardi families.

Looking back

These are the deep questions to ask your parents, best kept for a quiet hour once the conversation has warmed up. Some parents answer them at length, and some prefer to think and come back another day.

80. What do you know now that you wish you had known at thirty?
81. What was the best decision you ever made?
82. Is there a road you did not take that you still think about?
83. Whom have you never properly thanked?
84. What has surprised you about growing older?
85. What does a good life look like to you now?

Questions for an anniversary

At an anniversary the questions turn to the two of them together. Ask with both parents at the table and let each answer in turn, since two versions of the same day make the best stories.

86. What do you each remember about the day you met?
87. What did your friends think of the match?
88. What was the first thing you bought together?
89. What does each of you do that the other still finds funny?
90. What would you tell a couple getting married today?

Funny and hypothetical questions for the table

Fun and hypothetical questions loosen up a holiday table, and the answers can tell you as much as the serious ones. Let each person at the table ask one.

91. If you could go back to any year of your life for one day, which would you choose?
92. If you had never met Mom (or Dad), where do you think you would be living?
93. What is the strangest job you ever had, or nearly took?
94. Which of your children was the easiest baby, and which the hardest?
95. If you could have any talent at all, what would it be?
96. What is the worst haircut you ever had?
97. What would you do with a free week and nothing you had to do?
98. Which famous person did you meet, or nearly meet?
99. What did you believe as a child that turned out to be false?
100. What would you put in a box to be opened by your great-grandchildren?

What a recording cannot do alone

A recorded conversation keeps what a parent remembers, and memory is the family's best guide to where to look. A recording cannot confirm a date or find the records of a parent's own parents. It cannot read a letter in a language no one in the family reads, or tell which of two men with the same name belongs to the family. Names change as they pass from one generation to the next, and a remembered year can be a year or two off. The records settle what the conversation starts.

Ask a parent for every name a relative went by, and every spelling. How a family history is researched follows one family from its papers and memories to the archives.

From your parents' answers to the records

Some of the answers can be checked straight away, from home and without charge. These steps take the answers from the conversation to the first records.

1. List what was said. After each conversation, write down every name, place and date your parent mentioned, who said it, and how sure they were.
2. Find your parent's childhood home in the 1950 census. A parent born before April 1950 to a family living in the United States should appear as a child in the household, at the address where the family lived on April 1, 1950. The National Archives' 1950 census site is free.
3. Look at the page together. The neighbors and lodgers listed around the family are a good way back into questions 1 to 11.
4. Find your grandparents' arrival and citizenship. Passenger lists and naturalization papers usually name the town the family came from. How to trace your ancestry explains which records to search, in order.
5. Order your parents' marriage record. It is held by the state, county or city where they married, and the CDC's Where to Write for Vital Records names the office for each state.
6. Check each find before it goes into the family tree. How to check that a record belongs to your family sets out the method.

Recording the answers

At a holiday table the best stories come up without warning, so decide beforehand who will listen for them. How to record a parent's stories covers the details. These are the results to aim for:

• Every word can be heard. A crowded table seldom allows it, so keep the longer stories for a quiet afternoon with a chair pulled close.
• Each recording begins with the date and who is speaking, and the file carries the same name.
• Names, towns and dates are written down as your parent spells them, with a note of anything they were unsure of.
• Every brother and sister has a copy, and at least two copies are kept in places as far apart as practical and checked once a year, as the Library of Congress advises.
• A typed transcript sits beside each recording, with your parent's words left as they said them.

What the answers lead to

Every relative, town and year your parent names in these conversations is what the archives need. A commissioned book starts from those answers, and the recordings become part of the family's history. Zichronos researches a family in the archives that hold its records, then publishes its history as a finished hardcover book, and a commission can include our own interviews with a parent and other relatives. Most commissions take three to four months.

Family history book examples shows what a researched book holds, what a family history book costs compares the prices of each kind, and How we work sets out the steps. How to write your mother's or father's life story covers what a family can write itself, and more guides are in family stories and keepsakes.

Sources: Smithsonian Education's guide to family folklore interviews; the Library of Congress on keeping personal audio recordings; the US National Archives on the 1950 census; the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, Where to Write for Vital Records; Chabad.org on the thirty-nine kinds of work and electricity on Shabbat; StoryCorps on great questions; the example's own pages for the birth dates and names shown. Checked October 2026.