Family History Questions – How to make an ideal list

A family video biography interview wouldn’t be realized without a handful of family history questions to be asked. The importance of question structuring and selection is sometimes overlooked but the truth is, they are what make or break the overall output of the family biography. So how do you make the ideal interview script? We’ll give you some tips and guidelines below.

1. Start from top to bottom.

This might sound too obvious but trust me, there are a lot of amateur interviewers who fall in the trap of setting up disorganized interviews by pitching all the random questions they can think of. Obviously, this isn’t the way to go. You need to have a sequential and progressive method of pitching family history questions.  List them down before the interview and arrange them in such a way that every succeeding question is related to the other thus, providing a smooth transition from query to query. A simple example: you shouldn’t be asking a grandmother about how her family traditionally spends Christmas just after asking what her name is. Simple logic, but sometimes overlooked.

2. Make a long but short list.

Always remember that in conducting interviews, you don’t own the rest of the interviewee’s time. You need to make sure that your set of interview questions is long enough to extract important details from the interviewee and her family while being short enough to not bore her throughout the course of the interview. The ideal number of questions in an interview would be 50 and it should take about an hour or two. But if after that time you really have a lot of questions left, you could always try and schedule another session at a time convenient to the interviewee.

Those are some simple yet really significant steps in a family biography interview procedure. To learn more about how professional family video biographers pitch their own family history questions, please visit Tree Ring Films.

Not sure what family history questions to ask? Leave it to the pros at Tree Ring Films – Visit them now!