25 Thanksgiving questions to ask grandparents and parents at the table

The short answer

Ask one good question between courses, not twenty at once. Start with food and places (easy, happy), move to people and firsts, and save the big questions for the walk after dinner. Have one person record or jot answers. Twenty-five questions are below, grouped so you can use five and keep the rest for Christmas.

Thanksgiving is the one dinner where three or four generations sit still at the same table for two hours. Most families fill the time with football and the weather. A few questions, asked with real interest, turn the same dinner into the evening everyone remembers; they also start a family record that does not exist yet.

These questions are written to be answered out loud by someone in their seventies or eighties, in front of grandchildren. They avoid the broad ones (“tell us about your life”) that make people freeze, and the painful ones that belong to a private conversation.

Before the meal: three rules

1. One question at a time, and let it breathe. Silence after a question is the person remembering, not refusing.
2. One recorder. A phone on the table with the voice memo app running, with permission, catches everything. A teenager with a notebook works too and often enjoys the job.
3. Follow the answer, not the list. If “what did your mother cook?” turns into a story about the farm, let it. The list is a safety net, not a script.

With the first course: food and places (easy and happy)

1. What was on your family’s Thanksgiving table when you were ten?
2. Who did the cooking, and what was the one dish nobody else was allowed to make?
3. What did your kitchen look like when you were growing up?
4. Is there a recipe you still make the way your mother or grandmother did?
5. What was the first meal you ever cooked for someone else?

With the main course: people and firsts

1. How did your parents meet?
2. Who was your best friend at school, and what did the two of you get up to?
3. What was your first job, and what did you buy with the first money you earned?
4. What was the first car you drove, or the first long journey you took on your own?
5. Who in the family were you closest to as a child, and why?
6. What is something your grandmother or grandfather said that you still repeat?
7. How did you and Grandpa (or Grandma) meet? What did you think of each other the first time?

With dessert: the house, the town, the times

1. What did the town look like when you were young, and what has changed most?
2. What was in your bedroom as a teenager?
3. What music was playing the year you turned eighteen?
4. What did a Saturday look like when you were our age?
5. Which world events do you remember hearing about first, and where were you when you did?
6. What was the best present you ever received as a child?

On the walk after dinner: the questions that go deeper

1. What is something you are proud of that the family may not know about?
2. What was a hard year, and what got you through it?
3. What do you wish you had asked your own parents?
4. What is the best advice you were ever given, and did you follow it?
5. What are you most grateful for this year?
6. What would you like your grandchildren to know about you in fifty years?
7. Is there a story you have been meaning to tell us?

Ask the last one every year. The answer changes.

After dinner: what to do with the answers

Most Thanksgiving conversations are lost by December. Three ways to keep this one:

• Save the recording with a filename that says who, when and where (our guide on organizing oral history files covers naming and backups).
• Write the best answers into a memory book. A guided memory book gives each answer a page, and the questions above map to its chapters. Hand it over as the Christmas gift a month later, with the first page already written from tonight.
• Ask for the recipe. Question 4 nearly always produces one. Write it down before the evening ends.

If a grandparent has memory loss

Choose the early questions (food, kitchen, music, best friend) and skip anything that asks for dates or names. Long-term memories are usually the clearest, and a wrong detail does not need correcting at the table. Our guide to interviewing someone with memory loss has the full approach.

If you want the full set of questions

These twenty-five are the Thanksgiving selection. The full list for a sit-down interview, grouped by life chapter, is in questions to ask grandparents about family history, and the parent version is in questions to ask parents.