Questions to ask your grandmother
Grandmothers hold the domestic history: who cooked, who taught, who kept the family running. These questions ask about the life that rarely made it into photographs.
Every guide in this family works the same way: ask slowly, one question at a time, and write down the year you asked. The related guides — questions to ask your grandparents, how to record family stories, and the full guide index — cover the rest of the method.
Her girlhood
- What was your mother like when it was just the two of you in the kitchen?
- What did girls your age worry about that nobody worries about now?
- What were you known for in your family — the responsible one, the funny one, the difficult one?
- Who taught you the things you knew how to do, and who taught them?
The kitchen and the skills
- What did you cook that you never wrote down because your hands knew it?
- What is the recipe everyone in the family gets slightly wrong, and what do they get wrong?
- What did you make by hand that people buy now without thinking?
- What skill do you have that you think will die with you — and who should learn it?
Love, work, and the years in between
- What did you want before you met Grandpa — and what did you give up, if anything?
- What was the hardest stretch of raising your kids, and what did you do for yourself in those years?
- What do you know about men that you would tell a young woman today?
- What year of your life would you live again, exactly as it was?
About us
- What was I like as a baby that nobody ever told me?
- What do you see in me that came from your side of the family?
- What did you learn from your grandmother that you passed to us without saying so?
The one-rule method: one question per visit. A grandmother answering a question about her mother is doing two things at once — remembering and deciding what to keep. Let her. File each answer in the vault with the year; the year she answered becomes part of the story.