4/1/2000
By Sharon DeBartolo Carmack
Oral-history interviewing can enrich your family history and unlock your relatives' memories – if you go easy on the who, where and when and focus instead on why, how and what.
When I started to research my family history, I dutifully interviewed my grandmother, asking her questions like when and where she was born, the names of her parents, when and where they were born, the names and birth dates of her siblings, the names of her grandparents and when and where they were born and died. Then, as all the genealogy how-to books advised, I verified everything she told me in one record or another.