Creating a Homeschool Oral History Project

Oct 5, 2026 | History, Latest

In college, I took a fascinating oral history course that focused on history passed down through informal methods. This included family stories, private recollections, and eyewitness narratives. When you think about it, most history is passed on this way.

Think about what you know about the history of, say, your parents or grandparents. You probably didn’t learn their life stories by studying documents or unearthing physical evidence; more likely than not, they simply told you about their experiences, and these stories were passed on as part of the family’s oral history. In my own family, we were all told that my great-great-grandfather fought in the Indian Wars and that one of my more distant ancestors was a pirate. These were the tales that formed part of the family’s self-understanding of who we are and where we come from.

What Is Oral History and Why Is It Important?

Oral history is the collection and preservation of firsthand memories through recorded interviews. It allows ordinary people to preserve personal experiences that may never appear in textbooks, official records, or other historical documents.

As part of that oral history course, I had to find someone and interview them about their life story. I had to record the interview and write a paper on it. I chose an old friend from high school who had spent years on the Great Plains hopping trains and traveling around the country as a drifter. It was an amazing experience! People’s lives are often more interesting than they think, especially when an interviewer asks the right questions!

Oral history isn’t just interesting; it is real history! Some of the most valuable historical records we have came about this way. During the Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA sent interviewers across the South to record the memories of elderly men and women who had been born into slavery. The result was a collection of more than two thousand slave narratives, firsthand accounts of a world that would otherwise probably never have been chronicled.

Studs Terkel did something similar in the 1970s and 80s. He traveled the country with a tape recorder, interviewing ordinary people. His book Hard Times and The Good War (which won a Pulitzer) preserved what it was actually like to live through the Depression and the Second World War. Today the Library of Congress runs the Veterans History Project, which has collected the recorded stories of hundreds of thousands of veterans so their experiences won’t be lost.

Textbooks can give us the dates of battles and the names of presidents, but if you want to know what history felt like for the people who lived it, there is no substitute for sitting down and listening to someone tell their story.

How Can Homeschoolers Conduct an Oral History Interview?

Homeschoolers can create an oral history project by interviewing a grandparent, relative, veteran, priest, parishioner, or family friend about his or her life experiences. Students prepare open-ended questions, record the conversation, research the historical context, and turn the interview into a written or recorded family history.

Every single oral history gathered in any of the collections above began the same way: somebody sat down with a person and pressed record. Conducting an oral history interview can be an excellent project for homeschoolers! It not only teaches them how oral history is collected and introduces them to events before their birth, but also builds bonds with older generations, who generally feel honored to share their life experiences with a young person. Grandparents are the obvious choice for conducting an oral history interview, but any older person will work. For example, an older priest, elderly parishioner, family friend, etc.

Here are some ideas for conducting an oral history interview with grandparents…

How to Prepare for an Oral History Interview

A good interview requires a bit of legwork before the recording session. The more thought your child puts in beforehand, the more comfortable the conversation will be and the better the end product. Here are some tips for preparing the interview:

• Choose a subject and a focus. Pick a theme to anchor the conversation. This can include childhood, military service, coming to America, a first job, or how they met their spouse.
• Do some background research. Have your child read up on the decade, the city, or the major events the person lived through. A child who knows a little about the 1950s, or about life on a farm, will ask much better questions.
• Write open-ended questions. Avoid questions that can be answered with “yes” or “no.”  It’s better to keep them open-ended to prompt conversation. For example, “What did a normal Saturday look like when you were my age?” is a lot better than, “Did you like school?”
• Plan for follow-up questions. Teach your child that the best material often comes from simple follow-up prompts like “What happened next?” or “How did that make you feel?”
• Give the interviewee time to prepare. Explain the project ahead of time and invite them to dig up old photos, letters,s or keepsakes. These often spark memories and discussion.
• Get permission to record. Ask whether it’s okay to record the conversation and share it with the family, and let them know they’re free to skip any topic they’d rather not discuss.
• Test your equipment. A smartphone voice recorder is perfectly adequate. Just make sure it works, it’s charged, and there’s plenty of storage before you sit down. My equipment has failed on me before mid-interview, so don’t skip this!

How to Conduct an Oral History Interview

The interview itself should feel more like a conversation than an interrogation. Your child’s job is to get the person talking, then listen carefully and let the stories unfold. Here are some tips:

• Pick a comfortable setting. Choose a quiet spot without the TV on or the dog barking. The kitchen table or a favorite armchair is usually best, and a hot beverage never hurts.
• Start with something easy. Begin with simple questions like where they were born or what their parents did for a living. This warms everyone up before getting into the bigger stories.
• Let silences sit. Kids are tempted to jump in the moment there’s a pause. Teach them to wait a few seconds, because people often fill a silence with the best detail of the whole conversation.
• Follow the tangents. If Grandpa drifts from his first job into a story about the time the river flooded, let him go! Some of the most memorable material comes from these sorts of tangents.
• Take notes as well as recording. Have your child jot down names, places, and dates to check later, along with any follow-up questions that come to mind.
• Be sensitive. Some memories are painful, such as war or hard times. If a subject brings up strong emotion, it’s fine to pause, move on, or come back to it another day.
• Say thank you. End by thanking the person for sharing their story. A handwritten card afterward is a nice touch and a good habit for your child to learn.

How to Turn an Oral History Interview Into a Family Keepsake

Once the interview is done, the real historical work begins. Making a transcription is recommended, just in case the digital media is ever lost or degraded. Older children can transcribe the recording word for word, while younger ones can write a summary or pick out a few favorite quotes. Either way, the listening and writing are great practice.

Encourage your student to check the stories against maps, dates, and records. (If grandma’s memory doesn’t quite match the facts, that’s a perfect chance to talk about how memory shapes the way history gets remembered.)

Finally, turn it all into something the family can keep. That might be a simple printed booklet with photos, a timeline setting the person’s life against world events, a family tree, and some of their best stories recorded in their own words. Give a copy to the person you interviewed, too. They’ll treasure it, and so will the generations after them!

How Oral History Helps Children Honor Their Parents and Grandparents

The Fourth Commandment obliges us to honor our mothers and fathers. The Catechism tells us that this applies, by extension, to all in authority over us and the elders who have been important parts of our lives. Conducting an oral history interview is an excellent way to keep the Fourth Commandment, because when we ask someone to tell us their story, we honor them. We are telling them that their life experience matters, that it is interesting, and worth preserving. And it is a fabulous learning experience for the interviewer, as well!

I highly recommend getting your kids involved in oral history interviews; they yield a treasure trove of fascinating stories that are invaluable and irreplaceable.