Have you ever had the experience of looking at a photograph and suddenly feeling a shiver go up your spine? I have. That shiver feels like a confirmation of truth somehow, and it certainly makes you pay attention to the photography. What is it about a scene from another country or time and place that you recognize deeply?
I was researching one of my personal ancestral lines which, according to the marriage record I was looking at, went back to a German town in what was Hungary but is now Romania. This was one of the towns which, while over hundreds of years was no doubt Hungarian, but the residents kept to German customs too, speaking both languages, building houses, wearing clothes, and keeping to customs that were more German.
So I wanted to see some pictures of this town and towns like it.
I went to a famous research institute, the Getty, and before I got there I ordered many books to be bought upstairs for me prior to my arrival. Not known for genealogy, but for art, the Getty Research Institute still houses MANY books that can be very useful to researchers of family history and genealogy researchers as well as those learning about other cultures and societies for which the expression of creativity is one factor. In this pile I found two books that were especially informative and interesting and that applied to my personal research. These books were not available through my large city library or anywhere else I checked.
In one of them there were black and white pictures of this German town. I turned the page to a simple street scene, and got the shiver up the spine. None of the other pictures in the book did that to me. I looked again. There was something about that curve in the road.
It made me wonder if I was having a moment of ANCESTRAL MEMORY.
The theory of Ancestral Memory is that in our DNA/genes we have memories of things our ancestors have experienced. In this case we are talking about a GGG.
This is different that Reincarnation Theories that suggest that we might incarnate in the same family, as a descendent of someone we were on earth years prior.
With Ancestral Memory, all you have is GENETICS, your own body carrying information. The theory has nothing to do with any spiritual belief.
Let's say that you were born and raised in the United States and identify as All American and really believe in justice and equality for everyone but you still find yourself fearing a certain ethnic group. (I realize that admitting to such a thing may even be considered not politically correct, yet I hear people say they have such fears!)
My friend Marilyn, who only recently realized that she has German heritage in her ancestry on one side of the family, has since hearing of Germans in childhood, has always felt a little sick to her stomach at the mention of them. She has never self identified as German and has self identified herself as Polish. She had of course heard about World War II and the Holocaust, but she had no reason to believe that her own family heritage was any part of that. Marilyn hated it when she learned she was genetically partly German, but she also felt there was no logic to it. After some in depth research and interviewing family members and then reading around the history of the places they came from, Marilyn learned that one of her ancestors had been taken from his house by German soldiers and had never been heard from again. He was not Jewish. This happened before World War II. When she got some photos of the town where this happened, she began to have a strong sense of having been there, of recognition. Marilyn does not believe in reincarnation but she now believes that her fear is the fear of this ancestor.
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Ancestry Worship - Genealogy
