Almost every family means to write down a parent’s or grandparent’s stories. Almost nobody does it, until it’s too late — and what disappears first isn’t the big facts. Someone always remembers the war, the move, the year of the flood. What goes is the texture: what the kitchen smelled like, what a loaf of bread cost, what their mother said the day they left home.
Tell Me Your Story is the journal that gets it finished. It gives you 200 curated interview questions across ten eras of a life, and wires them into a workbook that tells you, era by era, which stretch of the life is still thin and which questions are still worth asking first. One conversation a month, and the file plans the next one for you.
Why 200 questions instead of a list of prompts
A blog post gives you thirty prompts and no plan. This gives you a library and a method.
Every question is written to be read out loud, word for word — and every one carries a “Go Deeper” follow-up beneath it, the second question that gets the real layer once the first answer is out. The ten eras run from Roots and Before You through Childhood, School Years and Coming of Age, Young Adulthood, Love and Partnership, Work and Calling, Parenthood and Family Life, Home, Place and Everyday Life, and Times That Changed You, to Lessons and What You’d Pass On.
Each question is also graded — 57 Cornerstone, 102 Core and 41 Bonus. The Cornerstones are the ones worth asking first, because nobody else can supply the answer, and the dashboard counts them separately on purpose: if you only ever get through one pass, it makes sure it’s the right one.
The part a blank notebook can’t do
Open the Story Coverage tab and the workbook shows you the whole life at a glance: for each era, how many questions exist, how many you’ve captured, how many Cornerstone questions are still open, how many stories you’ve actually written up, a progress bar, and a depth band that runs from Not started to Complete.
Set a question to Captured and the bar moves. The dashboard then names the thinnest era for you — that’s your next conversation, already planned, instead of a negotiation about where to start.
- The Session Planner counts prompts planned against prompts actually captured, so a project that could run for years becomes forty-five minutes in the calendar.
- The Life Timeline works out their age at every event from a single birth-year cell — and the empty stretches between entries become the most honest list of what to ask next.
- The Photos & Artifacts log flags any photograph, letter, or object still missing a person, a date, or a story. That flag is the whole reason the tab exists: an unlabeled photograph becomes a stranger in one generation, and you are very likely the last person who can prevent it.
Knowing what to ask is only half of it
The hard part is the asking. The Interview Guide is that skill written down: how to set the room up, how to ask one question and then stay quiet, how to get past “oh, there’s nothing to tell”, what to do when a memory turns painful, and how to write it up afterward so it still sounds like them rather than like a summary of them.
Alongside it: a Start Here guide, The Complete Prompt Library in print (all 200 questions, so you can take them to a hospital room or a long drive without a laptop), a Preserving & Passing On guide, and Printable Keepsake Pages for the people who’d rather write by hand — including every Cornerstone question gathered in one place, for the day you find you have an hour and no plan.
Every tab opens pre-filled
The workbook arrives on a worked example — a clearly fictional family part-way through the project, with real captured stories, a half-filled timeline, and a dashboard mid-progress — so you can see exactly how a working journal behaves before you overwrite a single cell with your own.
Works in Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice
It ships as an .xlsx and as a one-click Google Sheets copy: open the included link, click Make a copy, and a fully working native Sheet lands in your Drive. No importing, no broken formulas.
Own it, don’t rent it
This is a file on your own drive, not an account on somebody’s platform. There’s no subscription to lapse, no company to be acquired and shut down, and no export to fight for later. Print it, copy it for every grandchild, and hand it on. Pair it with the Family Recipe Heritage Keepsake Binder for the rest of what a family passes down.
A keepsake, not advice
This journal helps a family capture what one person remembers, in their own words. It is not medical, legal, financial, or mental-health advice, and it is not genealogical research — recollections are often imprecise, and that is part of the record rather than a fault in it. These conversations can reach grief and hard memories; if one surfaces distress beyond a difficult memory, stop and help the person reach real support. Keep account numbers, passwords, and identity numbers out of the file — it’s designed to be copied and shared around a family. The worked example throughout is invented.
Not ready for the full journal? Start with the free Three Stories to Capture First printable — the three questions worth asking before any others, with room to write the answers down.
