How-to guide

How to record a parent’s life story, with questions to ask

Updated November 10, 2026

You don’t need special equipment or a script to record your mom’s or dad’s life story. You need a quiet hour, a phone and some good questions. The rest is listening.

Decide what you’re making

Audio is the easiest place to start: there’s no camera to feel self-conscious about, and a phone does the job. Video shows faces and hands, but takes more setup. A written book is the easiest to share and read, but somebody has to turn the recordings into text.

You can start with audio and turn it into the others later, so don’t let the choice hold you up.

What you need

A phone with a voice recorder app. Most phones come with one, and free ones are easy to find.
A quiet room. Turn off the TV and radio, and pick a spot away from the kitchen and the washing machine.
The phone close to them, on something soft like a folded napkin, so it doesn’t pick up every knock on the table.
Do Not Disturb or airplane mode on, so a call or an alert doesn’t cut in halfway through a story.
A short test. Record a few sentences and play them back to check you can hear them clearly.

Ask first, and explain why

Tell your parent what you’d like to do and why: you want to keep their stories for the family. Say who will hear the recordings. Make it clear they can skip anything and stop whenever they like, and mean it. That way it’s a conversation they chose, not an interview they’re sitting through.

Keep sessions short, and give each one a theme

A long session is tiring for both of you. Plan several shorter ones, each about one part of their life: childhood, school, work, marriage, raising children. A theme gives you somewhere to start and a natural place to stop.

Old photos, letters, a recipe card or a piece of jewelry make good openers. Ask them to tell you about it and see where it goes.

How to ask

Ask open questions. What was your house like? gets you more than Did you live in a house?
Follow up on the details. A name, a street, a smell, a sound. Tell me more about that works almost anywhere.
Let silences sit. Give them time to think before you move on.
Don’t correct them. If a date sounds off, note it and check later. It’s their story, as they remember it.
Let them wander. Tangents often lead to the stories you didn’t know to ask about.

Questions to ask, by theme

Pick a theme for each session and a handful of questions from it. You won’t get through them all, and you don’t need to.

Childhood

What do you remember about the house you grew up in?
What did your street or town look like?
What did you do for fun as a kid, and who with?

Their parents and grandparents

What were your parents like when you were small?
What do you know about where our family came from?
Who in the family were you closest to?

School and friends

What was school like for you?
Who were your friends, and what did you get up to?
Is there a teacher you still think about?

Work

What job did you have as a teenager?
How did you end up in the work you did?
What did a normal workday look like?

Love and marriage

How did you two meet?
What was your wedding like?
What did you learn about making a relationship work?

Raising children

What do you remember about the day I was born?
What was I like as a little kid?
What was the hardest part of being a parent, and what was the most fun?

Traditions

What holidays or traditions did your family keep?
Which recipes came from your parents or grandparents?

Looking back

What are you proud of?
Was there a hard time you’d be willing to talk about, and how did you get through it?
What do you want your grandchildren to know?
What’s something about you that most people don’t know?

For more, see our longer list of questions to ask your grandparents. Most of them work just as well for a parent.

After each session

Name the file with the date and the theme, so you can find it again.
Back it up in two places, such as your computer and a cloud folder.
Write down the names and places they mentioned while they’re fresh, and check the spellings with them next time.
Make a transcript. Type it up yourself, or use a transcription tool and correct it by hand. Automatic transcripts often get names wrong.
Share it. Brothers, sisters, cousins and grandchildren can listen, and they may have questions of their own for the next session.

If you can’t do the sessions yourself

Distance, busy schedules and shyness all get in the way. Some options:

A relative who lives nearby runs the sessions with your list of questions.
A personal historian interviews your parent in person, for a fee.
A written memoir service, if your parent likes to write.
An AI interviewer your parent talks to, described below.