How to Get the Most from Your Family History Interview

If you have done any reading on family history or talked about it to a genealogist, you have probably already heard that the first step of any genealogy research should be interviewing your relatives. Why? Because it is usually easy to do, does not require special knowledge or skills and, above all, yields unique information that cannot be substituted or found elsewhere. Also, it is a way to (re-)connect with family members in a meaningful and useful manner.

Having interviewed numerous of families, I thought I would share some tips and lessons learned along the way on how to do a successful genealogy interview.

• Select the interviewees. Naturally, the oldest family members tend to be the most knowledgeable about a family's origins. But do not limit your interview to your grandparents. In my observations, women usually have a stronger interest in family history than men. So, for example, a great uncle's wife can make a good candidate for an interview. Also, some younger family members can have the most insight into a family history, maybe because they were babysitted by their grandparents or just happen to have a natural curiosity for these matters. If there is no suitable person among relatives, try to find someone who was close to the family in the past, like a best friend, a neighbour, a co-worker, an ex-spouse etc.

• Interview more than one person. The more interviewees, the better. First, because different people will be able to tell about different lines and aspects of the family tree, which you can then combine and match, like pieces of a puzzle. Second, because this is a great way to validate the obtained information. In many cases, accounts of the same events will differ. By comparing them you will be able to see what information is confirmed unanimously and therefore is more reliable, and which facts need caution and additional verification.

• Prepare some questions in advance, but don't make it too formal. The main questions to ask in a genealogy interview are the names, dates and places of birth, marriage/divorce, death, other major events like immigration, military service, a family's religion etc. There are plenty of sample questions available online, for example here. However, I am not a fan of "universal", one-fit-all questionnaires, though, as each family's history is unique. Instead, make it into a flowing conversation, with natural, open-ended questions that are relevant for your family and reflect crucial points of a human life. Do not to make it very formal and technical, as it might feel like an interrogation.  

• Bring and/or ask for old photos, documents and letters. Human memory is tricky. Sometimes it fails to extract information from its “zipped files”. Having visuals, like family pictures, will help arise the hidden memories. Also, documents or letters that your interviewee may have can speak better than any memories. I remember visiting a family on a field trip in a Western Ukrainian village, when my interviewee was not recognizing any of the names I was asking about. The minute I was ready to leave empty-handed, she remembered there was an old letter in the attic. She returned with a yellow, decrepit letter from a relative, which turned out to be a condensed description of the family relationships and the missing links I was looking for. It felt like a message from across time, answering all my questions.

• Dating events. People, especially in advanced age, may have difficulties remembering exact years or dates. I deal with it is by “playing associations”. To get at least an approximative date, try making connections with other, better remembered events. For example, you can ask how old they were at the time of the event in question. Was it before or after they got married or had their first child? Sometimes you can even get exact dates, by relating to a holiday or a well-known event. It is amazing how such associative thinking can help in remembering even minor details.

• Plan several sessions with each interviewee. It happened so many times in my experience when an interviewee said he or she could not remember anything (else). Almost always, when I followed up in a few days, there would be a new piece of information waiting. Apparently, this is how memory works. By arising some memories, others are triggered, and so on. It is also preferable to interview different people separately, so that they do not influence each other's memories.

• Make a family chart. Always prepare some sort of a chart or a scheme of the family before a family interview. First, because this helps when the amount of names and relationships become overwhelming. And second, because having a structure in front of you will help you come up with better questions in the process of interviewing. This way you can improvise and not only stick to the initial plan. If you do not have a family tree yet, you can start with a simple drawing, keeping people on each generation on a separate level and adding new people as you go. It is not very common, but it can happen that the interviewed family may already have some kind of a family chart. The picture below shows an unexpected school project by a young family member, called “Social Genealogical Diagram of the Fedyuk family”, also in Western Ukraine.

• Record everything and quote sources. If your interviewee is comfortable with audio- or video- recording, definitely opt for it. This way you will have the most precise representation of the interview. If not, take notes of the conversation in some way. You will want to get back to the notes throughout your research process. Make sure you record not only the information about the family members, but also the sources of this information. Ask your interviewees how they know what they are telling about or why they think so. Is it their own experience, is it a guess or is it something they heard from others? Later,when analysing possible discrepancies, you can have a better judgement of which piece of information has more “weight”.

• Prepare for surprises. With all my love and respect to family interviews, I have learned to take them with a healthy dose of doubt. So many times have I encountered documents proving family stories and legends wrong. Just because “grandmother said so”, it does not always mean this is what really happened. It has to do with human subjectivity, tricks our memory plays with us and many other factors. We may remember a wrong piece of information or re-interpret it in some way, misunderstand, forget or confuse with something else etc. Getting the family's knowledge is just the beginning of research, which can and should be verified and supported with documents.

I hope this was helpful. If you haven't done so, consider conducting a family history interview at the nearest occasion, like holidays or a birthday. The sad truth is that there will not always be the opportunity to do so...

The Rationale Behind Genealogy Research

In this note I explore the reasons and motivations making people around the world engage in family research. To genealogy enthusiasts this may seem like an odd question to ask, but it might not be as self-explanatory. It is not intended to provide an exhaustive list of possible explanations, but rather to demonstrate the diverse contexts in which genealogy-related activities gain relevance and very practical uses.

Evolutionary interest in kinship. This is not a widespread view, but I came to believe that the fundamental reason behind genealogical endeavours is the biological phenomenon known as the kin selection. Put simply, it means that we are wired to be attached to those sharing our genes, as an advantageous evolutionary strategy. It can explain the emotional and somewhat sentimental attitude towards the people on a family tree, even if we never knew them personally. This in-built interest in kin is universal, but some contexts, described below, can create special attention to genealogy issues.

A quest for identity. Our ancestry defines our social and economic background, cultural environment, certain genetic characteristics etc. Therefore, discovering one's "roots" is tightly related to one's identity. This kind of quest for identity is especially strong in predominantly immigrant societies, where there has been a disruption between generations and, thus, loss of ancestral knowledge. This may, to some degree, explain the extreme popularity of genealogy in the United States and Canada. In 2014, it was rated as the second most popular hobby in the United States. Family history has become part of popular culture, subject of numerous TV shows, multiple online databases and businesses.

Genetic pressure to prevent inbreeding. For very small or nomadic societies it has been crucial to know one's close relatives to avoid genetic degeneration. A good example is Iceland, where a database called “The Book of Icelanders” (“Íslendingabók”) was created, with genealogical data on most of its population since year 874. A similarly strong case for ancestry knowledge can be found in nomadic cultures. Constantly moving people needed to know their ancestry in order to prevent close relatives from inbreeding. For example, the Kazakh tribes were supposed to know at least 7 generations of their ancestors, while the Somalis – at least 10 generations.

Religion promoting connection to ancestors. The best-known example is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which encourages its members to research their ancestry and hold special rituals called baptism for the dead. As a result, the Genealogical Society of Utah, established in 1894, now known as FamilySearch, is by far the largest genealogical organization in the world. Another example of religion promoting connections with ancestors is Confucianism, through the notion of filial piety. No surprise, the Chinese tradition to record family lineages, the so called Jia Pu, is arguably the longest in the world. Chinese genealogy can be traced as far back as 1600s and, usually, even further. Some Polynesian cultures, known for deifying their ancestors, have remarkably long traditions of memorizing and reciting their ancestry.

Entitlement to a title or status. Kinship and family lineages have many legal implications. For example, nobility titles can be inherited, the reason why the longest and most elaborate family trees belong to royal and aristocratic families. Another case, which has become popular recently, is obtaining “citizenship by descent”, i.e. based on the fact of an ancestor's citizenship. Many countries, especially in Europe, practice so-called Jus Sanguinis (“right of blood”). Some of them, including Italy, Ireland, Hungary, Romania, Poland, offer their citizenships on the ground of a 3-4th generation of descent which needs to be supported with documents.

Inheritance and other legal implications. This field is known as forensic genealogy. Its most common application is probate research or missing heir search that deals with succession to property by descent from a deceased, dying intestate (without a will). Apart from probate, other areas of forensic genealogy include guardianship cases (next of kin), civil pension, Social Security, veteran benefits, land issues etc. Genealogy can also be employed to prove the right to restitution, i.e. obtaining compensation of land, property, funds for a damage done to one's ancestor or close relative.

Health: assessing the risk of genetically determined medical conditions. Predisposition to many health conditions is considered to be genetic, which makes knowing the medical history of your ancestors an actionable piece of information. According to the Stanford Medicine, some diseases are genetic, but have a behavioral component, giving a good chance to preventive health care. Here both classical genealogy and DNA genealogy can be used. The former can help with documents, like studying obituaries or death records, while the latter can go beyond recorded health history. Some DNA genealogy companies offer so called “Genetic Health Risk Reports”. This one is a promising application of genealogy in the near future.

Remembrance: dealing with traumatic events. Genealogy can be a way to come to terms with the past. This is observed in the countries where a large part of population went through traumatic events. Holocaust provoked a wave of interest to genealogy. Today Jewish genealogy is one of the most developed in terms of institutions and resources. In Israel, genealogy is a big part of school education: children have assignments to make a family tree with at least 4 generations of their ancestors. Similarly, in the ex-Soviet countries the descendants of the GULAG prisoners, victims of Stalinist repressions seek genealogical data for some sort of rehabilitation, restoring the reputation of their ancestors. This resulted in an explosive number of databases and other resources for tracing the victims of the Soviet terror.

Psychotherapy: dealing with transgenerational patterns. The transgenerational approach in psychology is based on the idea that patterns of behavior can be transmitted across generations. The phenomenon of transgenerational trauma was was found in the Holocaust survivor's families in which psychological problems were discovered even in the generation that was born long after the war. This approach in psychotherapy and in family therapy to treat patients though analyzing their family trees (called in this context “geneograms” or “genosociograms”).

Cognitive: understanding humans. Last, but by no means least, genealogy is a powerful tool for human science. It can be viewed as a case of microhistory, to understand history through the lenses of individuals, rather than empires and states. As it is rightly noted in this blog post, genealogy gives a more “human” perspective on the pace of time. From genealogical research we can learn about living conditions, social norms and relationships, demographic and migration patterns etc. A great example is the most recent “big news” in the genealogical community – a research project of quantitative analysis on a 13-million people family tree. The researchers have used vast genealogical data from a popular web service to extract demographic data and came to interesting conclusions on familial dispersion and longevity.


As we can see, genealogy is based on powerful human instincts and has a multitude of applications. There are many depths to it that make it a fascinating field to work in.


If you have any ideas or other feedback on the reasons and motivations for genealogy research, please, leave a comment below.