Genealogy, inspired!
Spooky Season AKA the time around Halloween and Samhain, is a time filled with pumpkins, images of antiquity, costumes, scary movies, and ghost stories. Did you know, though, that it’s also the perfect time to connect with the ancestors in a more profound way?
It is believed that this liminal time offers up a thinned veil between our living world and the spirit realm, allowing those who have passed to communicate more easily with those of us still living.
Welp, after a nasty bought with COVID and a little recovery/catch up time, I finally carved out a couple of hours to sit with my new heritage journal, write out a few words on the first two pages, and complete the first spread! I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.
What all does it include?
Photos of Scotland, England, and Ireland (the lands of the majority of my Ancestors)
A map of Santa Fe (where I was born and raised)
A DNA helix
A copy of my pedigree through my 2x great grandparents…
It’s been a little over three years since I confirmed my biological father and half of my genetics…
Since I found my three half-siblings…
Since I learned so many details about so many strangers who I never knew existed and who are my kin.
I spent months upon months talking to siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins…
Gathering data and facts…
Staring into photos and details
Looking for all of the pieces of a massive puzzle that I hoped would come together succinctly to make it all of this history make sense in my head and my heart in present time.
My childhood was peppered with stories of my mom’s own childhood growing up in New York City. She’d tell me all about the sights and smells and sounds, about pounding the pavement and watching the world go by from the roof tops. She always tried to give me a sense of direction by including cross streets and landmarks.
NYC was big and wild and so very full of all of her adolescent adventures (the good, the bad, and the ugly) in addition to being a world apart from my own upbringing or understanding.
There’s something almost hypnotic about the way ripples expand in water when its stillness is disturbed by even the smallest movement, the tiniest pebble, isn’t there?
We spend our lives being told not to make waves, cause chaos. We’re told to hold steady, keep our heads down, and maintain the peace, whether it be in the family, at school, or in the workforce. And while this works for some longer than for others, there’s something to be said for shaking things up… for stepping into one’s power in ways previously unimaginable. Sometimes the catalysts are external, and sometimes they’ve been inside us all along.
This is the story of my NPE experience.
The search for Delia Duval, one of my great grandmothers, continues!
As I mentioned in my last post, I reached out to several kin directly as well as messaged a handful of people on Ancestry.com. Some of the Ancestry connections were DNA matches and a few simply had Delia in their tree and I was curious about their connection.
Do your Ancestors ever call to you? Ask you to look for them by tugging at the edges of your heart, tickling your thoughts, or whispering in your dreams? One of my great grandmas, Delia Duval, unknown to me until just a few years ago, has piqued my interest recently, and so my very intentional search for her has begun.
If I had to wager a guess, I’d say we all have that one favorite family photo that calls to us. That one photo that reaches into our hearts and asks us to look deeper. That one photo where everyone is looking at the camera (or no one is looking at the camera) and we just want to share it with everyone we know and love.
But maybe that photo has been damaged in one way or another. Maybe it got bent, or written on in the wrong way. Maybe something got spilt on it or maybe it’s been torn.
It seems fitting that, to properly begin sharing about my personal family history in this space, I must start with Hannah. From her I can work forwards and backwards in my maternal line as I share more individual stories, but in my mind, it all begins with her, the pebble tossed in the pond of my mind and heart as a small child, and from which the ripples expand.