How to interview your elders: the kit, the method and twenty-four questions

The records can wait. The archive in Spanish Town will still be there next year. The person who remembers the district before the road came through will not necessarily be.

That is the whole argument for doing the interviews first, before the certificates and the registers, and for doing them properly: recorded, backed up, and asked in a way that gets the story rather than the version prepared for company. Most families have tried this once, with a phone propped against a cup on a Sunday afternoon, and come away with forty minutes of a kitchen fan and a few names they cannot now place. This guide is what we have learned about doing it better.

It is in three parts: the small kit worth having, the method, and twenty-four questions written for Jamaican elders in particular, because the questions that work in a Kingston living room are not the ones in the American oral-history handbooks.

The method

Ask ahead, and say the word “record”

Do not surprise anyone with a microphone. Ask a week before, explain that you want to record so that the grandchildren will have their voice, and let them choose the day. Morning is usually better than evening. Plan for ninety minutes; stop at sixty if they are tiring, and come back.

Set up before they sit down

Test the recorder with your own voice and play it back. Put it on the table within arm’s reach of the elder, not across the room. Phone on silent. Fan off if you can bear it. Lay out the photographs and papers in the order you plan to ask about them, face down, so they are not a distraction until you need them.

Start with place, not dates

Nobody remembers the year. Everybody remembers the house. Open with where they were born, who lived there, what the district looked like, where the water came from, which church, which school, where the market was. Once the place is on the table, the people arrive on their own, and the dates can be worked out later from the records.

Follow the story, not the list

The questions below are a map, not a script. When a story starts, let it run. Your job while it runs is three short questions: who was that, where was this, and what happened next. Save the question you had planned. It will still be there, and the story you did not interrupt will not come back if you do.

Let the language change

Many elders begin in careful English and, somewhere in the first hour, move into Patois as the memory takes over. Do not steer them back. The Patois version is the real one, and the recorder does not care.

Close with the names

Keep the last fifteen minutes for the photographs. Hand them over one at a time and ask them to name every face, then say each name back and spell it, aloud, on the recording. This is the single most valuable quarter-hour you will spend on your family history.

Back up before you sleep

Copy the recording to a computer and to a backup drive the same day. Name the file with the person’s name and the date. Write a short note, who, when, where, who else was in the room, and keep it with the file. Then write down the three things you most want to ask next time, because there should be a next time.

Twenty-four questions for a Jamaican elder

In roughly the order to ask them. Skip any that do not fit; add the ones only your family can ask.

The place

• Where were you born, and who was in the house when you were small?
• What did the district look like then? Where did the water come from, and where did people buy their things?
• Which church did the family go to, and who was the minister?
• Which school did you go to, how did you get there, and who was the teacher?
• What did they teach you about Jamaica at school, and what did you learn at home that school never mentioned?

The people

• Tell me about your mother. What did people call her, and what was she known for?
• Tell me about your father. Where were his people from?
• Who were your grandparents, and what do you remember them saying about their own parents?
• Were there names in the family that nobody could explain, or that people said came from somewhere else?
• Who left? Where did they go, to Kingston, to Panama, to Cuba, to England, to America, and who stayed?
• Who in the family owned land, and how did they come by it?
• Who was the person everyone was a little afraid of, and why?

The life

• What work did people in the family do, and what work did you do first?
• What did you eat on an ordinary day, and what did you eat at Christmas?
• What happened when somebody died? Tell me about a nine-night you remember.
• What songs, sayings or warnings did the old people have that you still hear in your head?
• Was there ever a hurricane, a flood or a fire that changed things for the family?
• What did people believe that they would not have said in church?

The record

• Are there papers anywhere, a family Bible, a land title, letters, a passport, a funeral program?
• Who has the photographs, and who in them can you still name?
• Is there a burying ground on family land, and who is in it?
• Is there anything you were told not to talk about that you think the children should know now?
• What do you want the grandchildren to understand about where they come from?
• Who else should I be talking to while they are still here?

The shelf

Two books on doing this well

Neither is Caribbean, and both will make your interviews better.

After the interview

The recording is the beginning, not the end. The names you wrote down are the search terms for the registers, and the places are the parishes and districts that tell you which registers to open. Read the Names takes it from there, step by step, and the starter kit covers what to have on hand for the paper side of the work. For what the Scottish surnames in your notebook may mean, see The Scottish–Jamaican connection.

If the answers about land, a will or an old estate name keep coming back, the probate records are the next place to look. Our guide to Jamaican wills and inventories covers what those papers can confirm and what they leave out.

To see how interviews like these sit alongside a parish’s books and records, read our guide to Portland Parish family histories, which works through one parish from oral memory to the written page.