How to Cite an Interview With a Living Relative

 

How to Cite an Interview With a Living Relative

Your aunt tells you that your great-grandfather came from a village near Krakow. Your elderly neighbour remembers the name of the midwife who delivered half the babies on the block. Your second cousin emails you a list of family names she remembers her grandmother reciting. Every one of these is a source — and every one needs a citation just as much as a census record or a death certificate.

Why Oral Sources Need Citations

An interview with a living relative is a source of information, and that information may become evidence for a genealogical conclusion. Without a citation, you have no way to evaluate the information later — who said it, when they said it, how they knew it, and how reliable their knowledge was. Six months from now, you will not remember whether it was your aunt or your cousin who told you about the village near Krakow, or whether they said the name was Wieliczka or Wiślica.

A citation also helps future researchers evaluate your work. If you pass your research to your children or submit it to a genealogical society, the reader needs to know that a particular piece of information came from an oral source — not from a document — so they can assess it accordingly.

What to Record

A complete interview citation should include: the name of the person you interviewed, their relationship to the family (so readers understand how they might know the information), the date of the interview, the method (in person, telephone, video call, email, letter), the location (if in person), and where the interview notes or recording are held.

If the interview was recorded, note the format — audio recording, video, written notes taken during the conversation. If you wrote up the interview from memory afterward, note that too. An interview transcribed in real time is more reliable than one reconstructed from memory hours or days later.

Cite an interview as: [Name of person interviewed] ([relationship to family]), [method] interview by [your name], [date], [location if in person]. [Recording/notes on file with interviewer].

Evaluating Oral Information

Oral information is not automatically unreliable. A 90-year-old woman describing her own childhood has primary knowledge of those events — she was there. The same woman describing her grandmother's birthplace is providing secondary information — she is repeating something she was told. The distinction matters for the same reason it matters with any other source: primary information is more reliable than secondary information.

Memory is imperfect, and it degrades over time. Dates shift, names blur, and stories evolve with each retelling. But oral sources also preserve information that never made it into any written record — family traditions, immigration stories, reasons for name changes, feuds, secrets, and the daily texture of lives that official documents never captured. These stories are often the only bridge to the past that still exists.

Interview now, verify laterDo not wait until you have "finished your research" to interview elderly relatives. They are your most perishable source. Record everything they tell you — even the parts that seem wrong or contradictory. You can verify later. You cannot go back and interview someone who is gone.

When the Interview Contradicts the Documents

Sometimes Aunt Margaret's story contradicts the census record. Sometimes the family tradition about arriving through Ellis Island does not match the passenger list. When this happens, do not automatically discard the oral account. Note the contradiction, cite both sources, and evaluate which is more likely to be correct based on the circumstances. Sometimes the document is wrong. Sometimes the family story is wrong. Sometimes the truth is more complicated than either one.

The most valuable thing an interview can do is point you in a direction you would never have found on your own. A family story about "the farm in Ohio" might be wrong about Ohio but right about there being a farm — and that leads you to search agricultural records in states near Ohio until you find it. The story was imprecise, but it was not useless.

Email and Letter Correspondence

Information received by email or letter is also an oral-type source that needs citation. Cite the correspondent's name, the date of the message, and describe where you have filed it. Print and save important emails — digital correspondence disappears when accounts are closed. A printed email filed with your research is a permanent record. An email in someone's inbox is not.