Sixty questions to ask your parent, and how to record the answers

Do it in fifteen-minute sittings, not one long sit-down

An interview that is announced as an interview usually fails. Your parent goes formal, the answers get short, and you both feel the weight of why you are asking. Three or four questions at the kitchen table works better, and you can repeat it next week.

Pick a time you are already there. After Sunday lunch. The drive back from an appointment. The hour before their programme starts. Take one page of questions per sitting, never the whole list.

Write the date at the top of every page. In two years you will want to know when you were told something, and by whom. Ask the question, then stop talking. The pause is where the detail arrives.

If your parent asks why, answer plainly: "Because I do not know these things, and one day I will need to. And because I would rather have them in your words than my guesses." That is true, and it lands better than a reason you invent.

Record what they said, not what you think they meant. A record of their words can be handed to a sibling. Your interpretation cannot.

The administrative answers only they can give

Start here, because these are the answers that are impossible to reconstruct later. Ask for the fact and then ask the second question, which matters more: where is the document, and who else has a copy?

Write the answer and the location side by side. "Deed — solicitor's office, Hartley & Sons, Elm Street" is worth more than "we own the house outright."

One rule about numbers. Do not write account numbers, card numbers or social security numbers on a page that travels between houses or sits in a binder on a shelf. Write the institution, the branch, whose name is on it and where the statements arrive. Keep the actual numbers in one locked place, and note in the binder which place that is.

If your parent cannot remember something, write "asked 14 March, could not recall" rather than leaving a blank. A blank looks like a question you never asked, and a sibling will ask it again.

• Full legal name, including maiden name and every spelling variant used on documents
• Date and place of birth, and where the birth certificate is kept
• Military service: branch, years, and where the discharge papers are
• Every address lived at, with rough years — benefit and pension forms ask for this
• Employers and years worked, including the ones that closed down
• Which banks and credit unions, whose name is on each account, and where statements arrive
• Pensions and old workplace plans, including employers from decades ago
• Insurance policies of every kind, and where the paperwork lives
• Who does their taxes, and where last year's return is
• Who holds the deed to the house and the title to the car
• Whether there is a safe deposit box, at which branch, and who has the key
• Whether a list of passwords exists and where it is kept
• The names and numbers of their doctor, pharmacy, attorney, accountant and financial advisor
• Whether anything has been pre-paid, to whom, and where that paperwork is

The questions that only sound casual

These are the ones your children will thank you for. They are also the easiest to ask, because they are not about money or illness — they are just conversation, and your parent gets to be the expert.

Ask one or two per sitting, mixed in with the administrative list. Keep a phone voice memo running if your parent is comfortable with it; the way they tell a story is half of what you are keeping.

When a name comes up that you do not recognise, stop and get the spelling. When a place comes up, ask which town and roughly which years. Those two details are what make a record searchable later, and they are the two details that always go missing.

• What was your street like? Who lived next door?
• What did your parents do all day? What was your father's job actually like?
• How did you and Mum/Dad meet — the real version, not the short one
• What was the first thing you ever bought with your own money?
• Which job did you like best, and which one did you hate?
• Who was your closest friend at twenty? What happened to them?
• What did you do that your parents never found out about?
• Which house was your favourite, and why did you leave it?
• What was the hardest year, and what got you through it?
• Who in the family are we named after?
• Which of these photographs do you want me to write names on?
• What is the thing people always get wrong about you?
• What advice did you ignore, and were you right to?
• Which recipe do you want kept, and who taught you it?

The preference questions, and the line not to cross

There is a set of questions about how your parent wants things handled. They are worth asking and worth writing down. They are not worth trying to make binding yourself.

Ask them, date the page, and have your parent sign it if they are willing. That page is not a legal document and is not meant to be. Its job is to stop three siblings arguing about what they think Dad wanted. If your parent wants any of it to actually bind someone, an attorney is the person who drafts that. If any of it concerns medical decisions, the person to tell is their own doctor, so it goes on their record where clinicians can see it.

Ask which documents already exist and who holds the originals. Do not attempt to write, alter or witness any of them.

• Who do you want called first, before anyone else?
• Who would you want speaking for you if you could not speak for yourself — and have you told them?
• Which documents already exist, and who holds the originals?
• What do you want done about the house, and what do you not want done?
• Is there anything you want a particular person to have?
• Who should not be told things, and what should they not be told?
• What happens to the dog, and who has agreed to that?
• If you had to leave this house, where would you want to go, and where would you refuse?
• What have you already arranged, and with which company?
• Is there anyone we should contact who we do not know about?
• What would you want us to stop worrying about?

Record it so it survives you being tired

The record fails at the filing stage, not the asking stage. Decide the system before the first sitting.

Use a phone voice memo for the story questions and a written page for the administrative ones. Rename the audio file the same day, while you still remember: 2026-03-14 Dad - Navy years.m4a. An unnamed voice memo is lost.

Type up a one-page summary per sitting within 48 hours. Not a transcript — a summary with the facts, the names spelled out, and any location of a document. Put the date and "told to me by Dad" at the top.

File every summary in one place, in date order, behind one tab. If it is paper, one binder. If it is digital, one folder, and a copy somewhere that is not your phone.

Send each summary to every sibling as you go, even the one who is not helping. Two things happen: the record stops being your word against theirs, and occasionally the absent sibling supplies a correction that is actually useful.

Write a one-page index at the front listing what you have covered and what is still open. That index is what lets you pick this up again in six weeks.

What to do when they will not answer

Some questions get closed down. That is information too.

Write "asked, declined, 14 March" and move on. Do not press it in the same sitting. Come back in a few months with the same question phrased differently, or have a different person ask — a grandchild asking about the war gets answers a daughter does not.

When the answer is not forthcoming, go around it. Look for the document instead of the fact: the old chequebook stub, the envelope in the sideboard, the photograph with writing on the back. Ask a sibling, a cousin, or the friend who has known them for fifty years.

If what you are noticing is that the answers change from week to week, or that a question that was easy last year is not easy now, do not treat it as a puzzle to solve at the table. Write down what you were told and on what date, keep the dated pages together, and take that record to their doctor. A dated, factual record of what was said and when is genuinely useful to a clinician. Your diagnosis is not, and it is not your job.

Questions