Ancestors ~ Welcoming Those Who Came Before
When we talk about spirit, we tend to talk about the people closest to us. Our guides, our guardians, our teachers in the other world. And of course we include our nearest and dearest too the grandparents we loved, and if we’re lucky, a great-grandparent we still remember. But how often do we really stop and think about everyone else who came before us? Our seventh great-grandfather. The line of people stretching back long before living memory. Honestly, we rarely give them a second thought.
I think a lot of that comes down to simply not knowing who they were. That’s changing though, and quite wonderfully so, thanks to DNA testing and the family tree companies that have sprung up around it.
I did mine a couple of years ago. Spat into a little vial, sent it off, and some weeks later back came my results. Norwegian, Italian, French and Belgian, a splash of Irish, a touch of Scottish, and the great bulk of it settled firmly in England, north and south. From there it became so much easier to trace the family tree itself. On one side I’ve managed to go all the way back to the 1500s, and somewhere along that line I discovered that William Shakespeare is my seventeenth great-uncle. I’ll admit, I was rather proud of that one. On another branch there’s a great-great-grandmother born in a workhouse in the late 1800s. Two very different lives, both of them mine in some way.
And that’s really what got me thinking. All these people, real people, who lived and loved and struggled and are now long gone from this world — where are they now? Are they simply names on a certificate, or is there something more?
Do our ancestors still watch over us?
I believe they do. I think the same soul, once it has lived here and moved on to the other side, doesn’t simply stop caring about the family it left behind. I think many of our guides and guardians are exactly that people from our own bloodline, who knew us before we were even born, and who have chosen to stay close and lend a hand.
It makes me wonder about the pull some of us feel towards a particular place, a particular time in history, even a particular occupation, without ever being able to explain why. Perhaps you’ve always been strangely drawn to the French Revolution, or you feel oddly at home the moment you set foot in the Scottish Highlands. Is that just curiosity? Or is it something passed down, an inherited memory carried not in the blood but in the soul?
I think there are two threads running alongside each other here. There’s our physical DNA, which quite literally connects us to certain places, peoples and cultures. And then there’s what I’d call our spiritual DNA, the residue of lives we ourselves have lived before, or the imprint left by a guide or guardian who once walked those same streets. Either way, if you’ve ever felt that unexplainable pull towards a place, I’d encourage you to actually go and check your DNA profile. You might well find the Highlands are written into you after all.
Bringing them into the fold
Wherever that pull comes from, I think it’s time we widened the circle. Not just our grandparents, not just the guides we’ve come to know by name, but every single soul who came before us in our line, the soldiers, the labourers, the mothers who lost children, the ones who lived through plagues and wars and hard, hard times we can barely imagine now.
I believe their soul quality doesn’t vanish. I believe it still dwells in the other world, and that many of them remain willing, even eager, to help the family line they once belonged to. When we welcome them in as friends, as helpers, as guardians, we’re not inventing a relationship out of nothing. We’re simply acknowledging one that was there all along.
So next time you sit quietly, perhaps light a candle for your grandparents as you always do, spare a thought too for the ones further back. The great-great-grandmother from the workhouse. The seventeenth great-uncle you never knew you had. They are part of you, and perhaps, in ways we’re only beginning to understand, they are still part of your journey too.
Have you ever wondered or even researched your ancestors? Let me know in the comments below…
