The Strength of Your Ancestors Still Runs Through Your DNA

When you think about it, it doesn’t take long to realize that you and I are an absurd probability. Every single person in your bloodline, going back as far as bloodlines go, had to survive long enough to have a child. They made it through whatever adversity came for them. Every one of them.

Surviving plagues, shipwrecks, slave ships, famines, genocides. Or maybe just one bad winter that wiped out most of a village. Otherwise, you simply wouldn’t be here reading this with your coffee going cold beside you. It’s not a metaphor. It’s arithmetic, and it’s the kind of arithmetic that should probably stop you mid-stride more often than it does.

An Inconveniently Large Family Tree

Somewhere in your ancestry, or mine, or the person’s next to you on the bus, someone walked out of a burning village during the Crusades. Someone survived being loaded onto a ship in chains and, against every design of that system, lived long enough to have children who had children… who had you.

Someone hid in a forest outside a camp whose name still makes the room go quiet, and made it to a boat, and never talked about it, and raised a family anyway. This isn’t a competition of suffering—it’s a strange, uncomfortable club that everyone alive today belongs to, whether they’ve ever thought about it or not.

My own family tree runs through Ireland, and Ireland has never been shy about keeping its grief on the record. Between 1845 and 1852, a potato blight wiped out the one crop poor tenant families needed to survive—while, at the very same time, ships bound for England kept leaving Irish ports loaded with the grain, vegetables, butter, and animals produced by Irish farmers.

That detail tends to get left out of the tidy “crop failure” version of the story, and it shouldn’t be. Nearly a million and a half people died on that tiny island, mostly from diseases that starvation leaves behind—about 12% of Ireland’s inhabitants.

Against All Odds

Over 20% of the surviving population fled to other lands, many of them on ships so overcrowded and fever-ridden that historians now call them coffin ships. More than five thousand people died at sea trying to get somewhere safer. And still—enough of them made it.

Enough of them got married, had children, taught those children how to bake bread and hold a grudge (my Grammy was a champ at that, bless her soul) and laugh at funerals. Those traits still live in my family and color the way we see the world.

And somewhere as a result of one of those unbroken chains, here you are with a history of similar challenges in your own lineage, and here I am—blinking at a screen and wondering what any of it has to do with us today.

Turns Out, Quite a Lot

Here’s the part where it stops being history and starts being personal. Survival wasn’t only a matter of luck, weather, and politics—it required something within the people themselves. Inner strength. Stubbornness. Resourcefulness. The kind of hope that keeps showing up even after it’s been shut down a dozen times.

And none of that simply evaporated once the crisis passed. It got carried into our DNA. Passed down the way eye color gets passed down, or a particular laugh, or the family’s questionable taste in feuds that outlive their original cause.

Modern research into epigenetics has started poking at this idea seriously—the notion that trauma and resilience alike can leave chemical fingerprints on how our genes express themselves, like fingerprints that outlast the generation that endured them.

Scientists are still arguing over exactly how far that inheritance travels and through how many generations. But you don’t actually need a peer-reviewed study to notice that you come from people who did not quit. That fact is sitting in your cells whether or not anyone’s published a paper confirming it yet.

They’re Not Finished Rooting for You

Here’s where it gets even more interesting, if you’re willing to follow the thread a little further than the science currently goes. In most every tradition that predates the modern world’s discomfort with mystery, the ancestors were never considered fully gone.

The Celtic understanding of thin places—those spots where this world and the next lean in close enough to touch—was built on exactly this idea. The people who came before you aren’t a closed chapter. They’re more like a support crew that never clocked out, still invested in how the story turns out.

How to Actually Use This

None of this is meant to be a nice thought you read once and set down.

Start with your parents and notice what traits you inherited from them. Then take a look at your grandparents if you knew them. How were they like you? How were they different?

What still supports you? What challenges you? Just be aware of how their experience still shapes your sense of self, your view of the world, and your ability to function in life.

Do some research on your family line. How did they come to live where they lived? How did you end up being born where you started out? What sort of resilience did they need to survive?

Did they face slavery, genocide, famine, war? What did they do for fun and entertainment?

In short, get to know them, as far back as you can trace. Feel your way into their lives. It’s okay to imagine how they lived. Imagination is a doorway to truth beyond rational explanations.

What Is Remembered Lives

Once you have a sense of who your ancestors are, try this: next time you’re facing something that feels too big—a diagnosis, a move, a decision you keep circling without landing—sit for a minute and picture the ancestral line behind you. Not as ghosts. As your ever-present backup team.

Ask, out loud or silently, what they want you to know. You already carry whatever it was that got them through against overwhelming odds. It didn’t skip you. It’s simply waiting to be remembered.

You are the proof that it worked. Every time.

And it’s still working. As they say in many pagan communities, What is remembered lives. 

So remember. Tap into the generosity, the resilience, the humor, the stubbornness, and the pure joy of existence that kept your ancestors thriving for thousands of years—and remember, that is their gift to you right now.

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I’m already thinking about Autumn Equinox (or Mabon as some like to call it in recent years). For some reason it feels connected with ancestors… at least that’s what’s coming through right now as a possible theme for Faehallows’ next shamanic journey workshop.

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