181 Questions You Wished You had Asked Your Parents and Grandparents

An All Too Common Reality

One day years from now, your son or daughter or your grandson and granddaughter will come up to you and ask questions like:

• From what country did our ancestors come?
• When did they arrive?
• Where were your father and mother born?

You then look at them for a little bit and sadly you tell them…I don’t know.

For many North Americans and for many in other countries this scenario happens far too many times.

With our long work hours and busy families lives, for many of us the concept for the need to preserve the legacy of our love ones is not even on the back burner. Then one day it happens, one of our beloved family members passes away and then suddenly it’s too late to ask them the important questions about their life.

And as the years and decades go by and new members are added to our family line the new generations only see these once valued and loved members of our family line as distant peripheral characters in flat pictures.

One of the Greatest Passions of My Life

I have always had great love for history. To this day I still manage to read about twenty to thirty history books a year.

But though I have learned a great deal of history from books I’ve also gleaned a tremendous amount of knowledge from older people.

At the age of nine I asked my grandmother if I could document some answers to some questions I wanted asked her during an interview concerning her life. And ever since then I’ve conducted many living history interviews.

But in the many interviews I have done since then I’ve noticed that many of the people that I had talk to had forgotten many of the important facts concerning the lives of their loved ones. And because of these missing facts their children and their children’s children would barely have knowledge of their ancestors. I call this phenomenon the ‘Lost Generation Syndrome’.

The Creation of this Workbook

One day when I was interviewing my parents, my mom asked where I came up with these great questions. I told her that the questions had come from the years of doing of interviews.

A week later when I was working at my job an idea came to my head. I decided to take the best of the questions I had developed over the years and come up with this simple workbook by which an individual or a group of people could sit down with a loved one and interview them and thus better preserve the facts and details of their lives.

This workbook contains questions that lead to more questions. At the end of workbook it contains empty pages for preserving recipes and empty pages when the answers to the questions require more space. Also at the end of the book it has empty pages so a person or people interviewing can write down questions of their own to ask.

Ideally it would be best to ask the questions while a tape recorder or even better a camera is playing and then come back and write the questions in the workbook at a later time. This way there is now a legacy of the facts in two places.

Please do it now. Don’t wait. Invest in this book. Preserve the legacy and history of your loved ones before it’s too late.