Are Our Ancestors Inside Us?

My Uncle passed away a few weeks ago. And his wife, my Aunt, 3 months ago. My Aunt and I corresponded and shared an interest in genealogy. My generation wasn’t loaded with people. Nor the one before me. But the generations before that were massive. Lots of rellies.

So my cousin has handed me on all of my Aunt’s genealogy folders. I received them earlier this week and was transfixed looking through the detail at what she had collected. Way more than I knew she had.

My Aunt was my father’s sister. One parent died before I was born and the other only a few years later. My father was in his early 20s when this happened.

My mother’s side had little to do with one another. So for me I felt like I didn’t have alot of family around me. It was always really weird to hear something about anyone in the family. I was just not used to being *in* a family in that respect.

It was extremely emotional for me to see pictures of my grandmother and great grandparents and my great great grandparents in the box of goodies I received from my Aunt. I’m sensitive anyway, but there was this huge pull in my blood and bones. I’m sure alot of you know what I’m talking about, that’s why genealogy is so popular.

My grandmother’s side came from Italy. I always felt this side calling to me. I never knew why. I felt the Irish ancestry calling me too and the American. Less so the Scottish which is actually closer by a generation, and even less so the English.

When I first started researching where my great great grandfather came from in Italy, no one knew in my family either, but I just knew in my bones it was northern Italy. I could just feel it.

Sure I’m a psychic/medium but this is a different feeling to anything I get for my clients. I don’t receive information that deep for my clients, like it was in my DNA.

So I asked on Facebook if people thought we had a cellular memory of our ancestors. All were in agreement, most people said they felt an affinity with a place or country.

But what about an affinity with a person. Take my grandmother who I had never met. I have always felt an affinity with her. She died when mum was pregnant with me.

And I’ve always felt an affinity with my Mothers Mother’s Mother. We actually share the same middle name (not that I knew that until I started genealogy) and we shared the same birthday. 101 years later.

So it got me to thinking, what about if some of the feelings I have, are actually my ancestors feelings?

I found a letter from my Aunt addressed to me, which she never sent to me, but sent a watered down version. When there’s no stories handed down about people then anything anyone says about a family member is like gold. She told me about how my Grandmother must have kicked my Grandfather out in the 1950s and he went to court to petition to get his conjugal rights reinstated. I had to find out what that meant. For a few days I felt like I was reliving her emotional life, what she must have gone though. And I asked myself why? Why are these feelings and thoughts coming to me.

That night I had a dream that someone was lifting a whole person out of me. And I woke up feeling more like myself.

Sure, I probably was tuning in mediumship wise. But it didn’t feel all of that. I didn’t feel I was tapping into the collective consciousness and having a typically feminine experience the world over.

I felt this in my bones. This story felt like something I had known and in part relived.

So it got me thinking and doing a bit of research. Does it not stand to reason that because our DNA is made up of each one of our parents, and in turn theirs before them, that not only do we look like our ancestors, and have health issues passed down in our genes. that we might also have a DNA memory of the lives they lived?

Because there was little contact and not alot of talking in my family, I just wasn’t handed down stories. So how can I feel the past now in my bones? When it wasn’t my life lived. But I seem to know some of what went on?

It doesn’t feel like a voyeuristic look into their lives, it feels more than wanting to make sense of their lives so I can make sense of mine. It feels like I’m having memories.

What do you think?

Postscript 2021: I wrote this article in 2010, since then there has been alot written and discovered about ancestral memories affecting us.