Not everyone wants to be interviewed. Not everyone is comfortable being recorded. Some people deflect. Some people say there is nothing worth telling. Some people mean it, and some people are waiting to be asked again.
Understanding which is which matters.
“There's nothing interesting about my life”
This is the most common resistance, and it is almost never true.
It usually means one of three things: genuine modesty, a habit of self-erasure that has become automatic over a lifetime, or a test — conscious or not — of whether you actually mean it when you say their story matters.
The response is not to argue. It is to be specific.
“I want to know what the mill was like.” “I want to hear about the move to Glasgow.” “I want to know what you thought about when you were my age.” Specific questions make it harder to claim there is nothing to say — because you are not asking for a life summary, you are asking about one thing.
Specific interest is harder to deflect than general interest.
“I don't want to be recorded”
Respect this immediately and completely. Never push.
Some people are uncomfortable with cameras. Some have complicated feelings about their own voice or appearance. Some have reasons they won't explain. None of these require your understanding before you accept them.
If recording is refused, the conversation still matters. Notes are better than nothing. A written account based on what you remember afterwards is better than nothing. The memory preserved in your own head, passed on to your children, is better than nothing.
The recording is the ideal. It is not the only path.
You might also find that resistance to recording softens over time, once the person has experienced the conversation itself and seen that it was not threatening. Do not push in the moment. Leave the door open.
Silence and deflection.
Some people go quiet at certain questions. They change the subject. They give short answers and wait for you to move on.
Follow their lead. The silence is information. The deflection is a boundary.
This does not mean the territory is permanently closed. It means it is closed today, or closed with you, or closed in this format. Sometimes a question that produces silence in a direct conversation will open up later, approached differently, in a different context.
Note what was deflected. Come back to it gently, another time, if the relationship allows.
When there are things they have decided not to pass on.
Some silences are protective. Some people have decided, consciously or otherwise, that certain things end with them. Shame that has been carried for decades. Pain that was never spoken about. A part of the story they do not want to become the family's story.
You may sense this. You may even know what it is.
Do not force it. The attempt to extract what someone has chosen to keep will close more doors than it opens, and it will change the quality of everything else they share.
What people choose to keep is part of the record too. The silence tells you something, even if it doesn't tell you everything.
The second ask.
If the first approach is declined, wait. Do not interpret a no in one moment as a no forever. People change. Circumstances change. The person who deflects in their seventies may be more willing in their eighties, when the question of what gets left behind feels more immediate.
The most important thing is that they know the offer is open. That someone cares enough to ask. That the door is there whenever they are ready to walk through it.
Sometimes that knowledge alone is enough to change things.