From question to story in 5 steps - How to interview your family to document memories
Photos capture singular moments. The laughter during your child's birthday party or the proud look in a grandmother's eyes when holding their grandchild for the first time. However, the main story isn’t found within a single frame. It’s found in the experiences of each family member: memories you can include in your journals and album by interviewing your family.
What’s the difference between reading a book's summary and immersing yourself in the pages of a great novel? The first gets you the essential information. The latter transports you into a different time and place to get lost in the story.
When you incorporate interviews to capture your family memories, you're not just reminiscing about "what happened" but delving into the nuances of emotions, the significance of gestures, and the stories behind those fleeting glances. These narratives enrich your photos, creating a multi-dimensional experience every time someone opens your family album.
Interviewing your family to document memories
How do you draw out those deep, nuanced stories that enrich your family photo albums? Where do you start to add a narrative to your visuals that incorporate the unique perspectives of the people involved? The most powerful way to draw this out is through intentional questions.
How do you interview your family to document their memories?
Asking your family questions about their experiences and stories is a great way to add a narrative to your family albums. There are two methods to interview your family members and friends to capture stories and memories:
Go all out and treat it as a real interview. Ask them in advance if you can ask them a few questions about a specific topic or event. Schedule a time and place for the conversation and come prepared with questions.
Keep it more informal and spontaneous. Instead of scheduling a time, seize the moment to ask thoughtful questions. A long car ride, a quiet moment during nap time, a glass of wine in the evening: that’s your chance! When you have your questions prepared, moments can unfold meaningful conversations that you can include as memories in your kids’ journals and albums.
5 steps to start including your family’s answers in your albums
Whichever method you choose, follow these 5 steps to start interviewing your family:
Determine who you want to interview for your family stories
Write down the topics or questions you want to ask
Create the right setting for the conversation
Record their answers
Transform their answers into a narrative
Let’s break it down!
1. Determine who to interview for your family stories
Including your kids’ experiences in their own words
As soon as your kids are old enough to hold basic conversations, their answers are one of the most valuable content you can add to your family albums. What better way to capture your kids’ childhood than to include their experiences in their own words? These contributions are some of the most endearing, humorous, and insightful windows into your family’s life.
Asking your circle for their perspective on your family life
Capturing narratives isn’t limited to kids. Other voices also enrich your family's story. Every individual, from the grandparents to the babysitter, brings a unique vantage point. They observe moments, quirks, and transformations that you might miss. Their narratives can provide a fuller picture of your child's life, capturing the essence from multiple angles. Seek stories, observations, and feelings from those who interact with your family and child.
When asking for their participation, explain to them why it’s so important to you to capture their perspective and document the memories for your kids. Acknowledge their unique position in your child’s life and express genuine interest in their stories. Also take the pressure off as much as possible. You probably don’t even want to call it an “interview”. Simply ask them if you can ask them a few questions about your family and your kids to be recorded in their family albums. This sets a comfortable tone for the conversation.
2. Write down the questions you want to ask your family members
Questions to ask your kids to learn about their experiences
Depending on your kids’ age, your questions to them can range from very specific and simple to more abstract and deep.
Establish storytelling as a family tradition after an event like a birthday, family outing, or vacation by asking your children questions about their experiences.
To help avoid non-answers, you can make it into a game. For example, play High Low Silly-so, where everyone shares one highlight, one not-so-fun moment, and one silly moment. Another game is Two Truths and a Lie, where the kids share two things that are true stories or experiences, and one false. Your guess which one is the lie won’t be hard if your kids are under 10, and the two truths can provide insight into their experiences.
Besides asking them about an event, also try to formulate open questions that allow your child to steer the conversation. What do you want to know about your child’s world that can be included in a family album? What’s a latest obsession, favorite activity, or new skill that you can ask about?
Questions to ask friends or family to include their unique memories
When interviewing family members or friends for your family album, try to focus your questions on perspective or stories that add something new to your narrative. What’s an experience they had with your children you weren’t a part of? What do they notice about them you may not? How does their unique vantage point shine a new light on your family life?
Focusing your interview to gain new information allows you to have more specific questions, avoid generic answers, and add a rich layer to your family memories.
Need some inspiration? Follow Chapteron for frequent question prompts!
3. Create the right setting for the conversation
One of the biggest challenges interviewers face is to make the interviewee feel comfortable enough to make the conversation flow naturally. When I was interviewing on set, it was a challenge to get people to be themselves while surrounded by bright lights, cameras, and a full crew of strangers. More than once, I had a hard time getting the story and personality out of the person like I had during the pre-interview in a coffeeshop or my office. This shows that the surroundings and setting of the conversation play a huge role in the quality of answers you’ll get!
As a parent who wants to capture family stories, be mindful of this by creating a time and place for the conversation that makes your child or family member feel at ease.
Here are a few tips for creating the right setting for interviewing your family members:
Place yourself in their shoes. Where are they in their element? What time of the day are they the most lively, social, or chatty? Is there an activity they enjoy that you could do together while asking them questions? Shoulder-to-shoulder is almost always more comfortable than face-to-face. For example, ask questions while coloring or playing with Legos with your 6-year-old, or going for a drive or beach walk with your mother.
Set the right tone for the conversation. Remind them there are no right or wrong answers. Let them know how interested you are in the way they view and remember things. Especially younger children and teenagers need more frequent affirmations and prompting to get them beyond the infamous non-answers of “yup”, “I guess”, and “I don’t know.” (We’ll go into some advanced interviewing techniques for kids in part two of this guide.)
If you’ve set a time and place for a sit-down interview, schedule it for 20-30 minutes. Much shorter may limit your ability to ask follow-up questions. Much longer may feel overwhelming for them, and for you when you have to process the recording afterward. Younger kids will obviously not be able to hold a long conversation, so you’ll want to split up the conversation in sets of 2-3 questions.
4. Record the conversation and rename the file for easy retrieval
Once you start the conversation, record their answers about your family. No fancy equipment needed; your phone’s voice recorder app will do.
Recording often makes people self-conscious. After asking for permission, hide your device as much as possible. Nothing like the sight of a camera or phone to take a person out of their natural storytelling mode!
This is especially true for younger kids: once they know they’re being recorded, their once-thoughtful answers quickly become a series of jokes about Mr. Fartface. To avoid this, you may need to secretly hit record and ask them permission to use it for the family album afterward.
If you’re doing the “grasp the moment” interviewing method, try to find a way to start recording their answers without killing the moment. This may seem harder than it really is. I often go with a lighthearted, “Oh, I love what you just said! Can I quickly hit record on my phone so I remember this and can include it in our family album?”. The key here is to go back to the conversation quickly and steer them to the place in the story they left off. You’ll likely need to remind them of what they said: “Sorry for interrupting! So you were saying that…”
Do you have family members living far away? You can still include them by setting up a time to interview them through a video call. If you use Google Meets or Zoom, you can easily record the call in the app. If there’s no in-app recording feature, you can use Quicktime or similar screen recording app to record your call. A phone call works too, but missing facial expressions and other non-verbal cues can make your interview harder to steer.
Renaming your recording
Immediately after ending the recording, change the title of the file to include the most important information. Stick with the same naming convention for every recording. This makes it easier to find and process the recordings into a narrative for your family album later.
Include these 5 elements when renaming your interview recording file:
Start with an abbreviation that tells you this recording is for your family album. For example, start each recording with FM for Family Memories. This makes searching for the recordings easier, and it groups them together if you’re using alphabetical sorting.
Then, include the date in opposite order (year - month - day). This way the alphabetical sorting will also become chronological. A recording in October starting with file name FM231020 will now be first in the list, followed by a recording in November with file name FM231101. If you had used FM201023 and FM011123, this would not have worked.
Next, include the name of the person you recorded.
And finally, include 3-4 keywords about the question you asked or the story they told.
To avoid issues with certain applications, it’s recommended to use an underscore instead of a space in between the different elements. For example, the file name would look like FM_231020_GrandmaJoanne_Beachvacation_Normandy
5. Transform the interview answers into a narrative for your family album
Now that you have a gold mine of unique perspectives and memories, it’s time to weave them together into a story you can include in a family album or journal.
Sometimes this is as easy as transcribing the conversation, editing it for readability, and including it verbatim in your family journal.
However, it often requires much more editing than this. The most complete and natural way to include interview answers in your family albums is to dedicate a section to a specific topic or event and take the first stab at the narrative. For this initial draft, the goal is to establish the theme and structure — not perfection or completion. Then, find several places in the story to add direct quotes or indirect summaries of other people’s perspectives. Finally, read through the narrative a few times to find places you can add bridges or other points of connection to improve the flow. This avoids that your family photo album becomes a chaotic mix of dialogues that barely fit together.
Keeping your own narrative as the foundation will also help you tie the visuals and the words of your family album together, because you can steer your narrative to describe the moments captured in the photographs.
Add narrative to your family albums through questions and interviews
Photos freeze moments, while questions animate them. The true power of understanding how to interview your kids and family members lies in unlocking tales that might otherwise remain untold. It's the dance of visuals and words, the spoken and the silent. So, the next time you look at a photo, let curiosity lead. Write down a question. Start a conversation to dive deeper. Record the memories through other people’s eyes. Add the narrative so your family story can unfold, page by page.
