Not a formal interview, but one time when I was much younger my Grandma came out to visit. For some reason we were all sitting around the table one evening, and I had a tape recorder. We all started talking and I hit record and just sat there and listened. I flipped the tape when it ran out and continued taping. She passed away probably 5-10 years later and I held onto the tape. Once technology caught up, I digitized it and turned it into a cd. I break it out now and then and listen to her talking about our family history. Since then I have made it a point to record family members, even if it’s just to hear their voices again. So get after it…

Edit: I will add this, I am so glad that I didn’t try and dominate the conversation and I just let her run with it. Make sure you give the person you are recording the latitude to just talk and reminisce.

Yeah, I recorded some interviews with a few of my family members for a school project. Later I put it all together as a book of family history. It’s was super cool to put together all the stories that we knew bits and pieces of and many that we didn’t even know about. It’s can be really rewarding.

Informal, but yeah. It wasn’t structured really, just a conversation that flowed after suggesting it to my grandfather that was in poor health and expressed a regret at not being able to tell my niece some of the stories from his family history.

It wasn’t specifically about genealogy, though it did include that as a side benefit. Hard to tell a story about his great-great grandfather without covering a big patch of of genealogy.

Most of it was about him, his mother and father, and then some of the stories that got passed down about family further back.

I very strongly suggest doing it if it is at all possible. Once you get started, questions will come to mind you can’t plan for. You can get details they might not think to include if they were just writing it down or self recording.

People just don’t think to record normal life, or even unique and interesting stories about themselves, so such things get talked about by others, but still never written down or otherwise recorded. You might run across someone’s journal if they kept one, but that isn’t as common as you’d think.

Just as an example, my grandfather would sometimes mention in passing that he left the little mountain town he was born in to get a job in Ohio. What he never mentioned until it was a sit-down with questions was that the entire trip was him walking, catching rides, and hopping a train. He had never mentioned that he had just turned 16 at the time. He had never talked about the first night sleeping under nothing but a blanket on the side of the road, shivering and startling awake at the sounds of larger animals in the woods.

All of that came out (and more) because I was asking for details. Like, how long did it take to get there? He’d never thought to mention it, just that he made the trip and stayed with an uncle once he got there. He said it took about three days. That led to questions about how he traveled which opened up the story about sleeping near the road, no fire, and alone.

I promise you, if your relatives are willing, and you take the time to let them wander a bit, you’ll find out little things that are worth the time and effort.

We went through my Great Aunt’s old photo album with her a few years before she passed at 101(!) We recorded the audio and scanned the whole photo album, so we now basically have a whole slideshow narrated by her going through her old photos. She was the last person in our family from her generation and there were people and places in that photo album that no one else would have been able to identify. At her memorial service, my brother took the raw material and edited together a five minute video presentation that included music, photos and her voice narrating. It was great at the service for everyone to have that contact with her voice again.

Both my father and my mother (divorced) have old 8mm film which I’ve recently digitized, and we’re now in the process of sitting down with them and informally recording their voiceovers with the old footage so we have a record of everyone and every place in the old footage.

We’ve also gotten subscriptions for my mother, father, and father-in-law to a service called storyworth that sends them a question a week via email and gives them a web form to answer the question in. They can also do more than one a week, select a different question if they don’t want to do the one they were sent, or make up their own question. At the end of a year, storyworth collects it all together and prints a book of all the generated material. Photos can also be added. It’s gone well, though their consistency has varied a bit. We’ve renewed all of their subscriptions for another year and we’re getting some great stories out of it.

When i was at uni 20 years ago or so I did one with my gran about when she went out to Australia as part of the ten pound pom scheme. They all hated it and spent their whole time saving to come back to the UK.

Sadly the computer I had it saved on had an absolute melt down and I was really bad at backing up back then.