When I was at McKinsey, I did not lack curiosity about my parents and grandparents. I lacked sustained attention. Work fragmented my mental space, and the things I cared about personally remained intentions: spend more meaningful time with them, ask better questions, understand where we came from, preserve something for my daughter.
There is an irony here. Clients do not hire McKinsey because their executives have no good ideas. An independent third party changes the conditions under which they can think. It facilitates conversations, challenges assumptions, brings structure to scattered information, notices what insiders take for granted, and helps people get underneath their first answers.
Families have the same problem, with more emotional constraints. Interviewing one's own parents is awkward. A parent and child share so much assumed context that obvious questions go unasked. It is somewhat easier with aunts and uncles. Sitting alone and writing about one's parents has another difficulty: it can begin to feel like writing a letter to them. That makes it harder to say plainly what one actually remembers—the affection, irritation, contradictions, judgments, uncertainties.
An outsider can ask, “What was your father actually like?” and genuinely not know the answer.
There is a practical side to this: someone has to assemble the photographs, arrange the conversations, follow the unanswered question into an archive, and remember to return to it. Most families already contain far more knowledge than any one family member can hold. It is scattered among people, places, objects, and versions of the same story.
But I do not want to reproduce the consulting model of disappearing for weeks and returning with the answer. The client should come along. The discovery process is part of what they are buying.
A map, an archival photograph, a reconstructed street, a soundscape, an unidentified person, two relatives remembering the same event differently—these can be staged as discoveries. I like the psychology of escape rooms and blind boxes: suspense, intellectual challenge, anticipation, surprise. The more we find, the more questions appear. “Finding Celia — to be continued” captures something real about the work.
With Celia, the search reached a yearbook image of a young woman her granddaughter had never known. That is a peculiar gift to bring back to someone. She knows the grandmother. I can find a record of the student. Neither of us can do the other person’s part.
I also have to remember how much work sits between finding a document and making it useful. The yearbook contains school life as well as a portrait: instruments, lockers, tooth carving, jokes. Those pages give me a way to imagine the world around the person. They cannot tell me which private thought she had while living in it.
Each phase should still be complete. I do not want to manufacture cliffhangers or withhold answers to force someone to continue. A good first phase should simply make visible doors that nobody knew existed before the work began. Then we can choose which door to open.
For a busy professional, this turns family history from another worthy project they never quite get to into something that keeps arriving in their life. They can hand over the interviewing, research, organization and production without handing over their relationship with their parents. Their limited time can go toward the parts nobody else can provide: reacting, asking the next question, laughing, disagreeing, remembering, bringing in the children.
I like that the stranger in the room eventually becomes less of a stranger. But I should not become the person who supplies the family’s final answer about itself. Sometimes I bring a photograph. Sometimes I ask a question so obvious that nobody who grew up in that house would think to ask it. Then somebody begins to explain.