One question a week · Fifty-two stories · One book
The questions
Your family's stories guide our curator.
Every week we choose one question to send. Where it comes from, what goes into it, and what your family can keep out of it.
Three sources
Where the week's question comes from.
There are only three places a question can come from, and they are always taken in this order.
Somebody in the family asked it
Anyone reading the stories can send in a question of their own. A granddaughter, a brother, whoever set the year up. If one comes in, it goes out first, and the email says who asked.
The curator wrote it
Most weeks, this one. Written for one person. Built from their family tree, the decade they were young in, and whatever they mentioned last time. Never one they have already been asked.
It came from the standing bank
The same set for everybody — a first car, a first paycheck, the street they grew up on, none of them about anyone in particular. They carry the early weeks, before your family has told us anything.
What we use, and what we don't.
This is the whole list. Your family put every line of it there, and they can take any of it back.
What we use
Enough to be specific
- The names, relations and dates on your family tree — so a question can say “your mother, Ruth” instead of “a parent”.
- The year your storyteller was born, so a question about 1963 is about the world they were actually standing in.
- Every question they've already been asked, so none of them comes round twice.
- The stories they've told most recently, in their own words.
- The questions they passed on, and the reason they gave.
- How long they like their answers to be, and which side they took on the this-or-that pairs.
What we don't
And they decide, story by story
- Any story they marked don't use this one. The switch sits on the page where they write it.
- Anything under a subject the family has put off-limits, checked three separate times before a question is allowed out.
- A photograph, or a recording. The curator reads words and nothing else.
- What a relative wrote back in the margins.
- Another family's stories. Nothing crosses between families, in either direction.
And when a story is a hard one — a death, an illness — we assume they'd rather not be asked more about it, unless they tell us otherwise.
None of it trains anything, and the screens we use to run Longtold show counts, never the stories.
One question
Everything that went into it.
From your family tree
Walter — their father. A pressman, 1904–1971.
From week four
They mentioned the print shop on Water Street, and the smell of the ink.
From the book so far
Eleven chapters on work. One on family.
From what they asked for
They'd rather write a few paragraphs than an essay.
What went out
What did your father let you do around the print shop?
The ink, the noise, what you weren't allowed near.
A few paragraphs is plenty — one good memory makes a page.
Prints in the book under Family
Before it's sent
Nothing goes out on one opinion.
Writing a question does not send it. Every one gets read back first, by a second pass that had no hand in writing it.
First pass
We write a handful
A few at a time, each aimed at a different chapter, so the year doesn't come out lopsided. Its instructions spend as much room on what not to ask as on what to: never sensational, never prying, and where your storyteller has raised something hard themselves, a gentle invitation to remember it and nothing more. When it isn't sure, we tell it to choose warmth.
Second pass
A second pass reads them back
Judged against a single standard, by something with no part in writing them: would this be uncomfortable read aloud at a family dinner? It throws out anything doubtful.
And if that second pass cannot be reached at all, the batch is thrown away rather than sent. You get no question that week. We would rather that than the wrong one.
Or have none of it.
Turn the curator off and still get a year.
One switch, and nothing your family writes ever leaves for a model again.
Leave it on and the questions know their names. Turn it off and they don't. Either way there are fifty-two stories.
What you keep
- The standing questions — the same set every family gets.
- Every question your family asks each other, for as long as the year runs.
- The same hardcover at the end of it.
See the first question they'd get.
Tell us who you're asking and roughly when they were born. The first one goes out on the day they choose.
Start a year