Tag: religion

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Journey to Ancestral Lands: My Spiritual Connection

As earlier posts perhaps introduced you to aspects of my spiritual journey, I’ve also shared about Gary Alan Taylor @Holy Heretics and the writings, interviews and thoughts posted there. Great stuff!

This recent post really called to me: https://holyheretics.substack.com/p/the-secret-of-smithfield The Secret of Smithfield – the church of St. Bartholomew in London. Hidden away a bit but beautiful and drawing me in. We’re planning a trip to England this year, spending a short time in London before heading north to York and Lincoln, the Cotswalds and then home. I’m putting this one on my list as a place to visit away from the busy city.

Credit to Jiří Komůrka from his posting of this picture about 2024, found on Google when I went to look at images of St. Bart’s. Thank you, Jiri!

Thank you to Gary who shared about “morphic resonance” and I wrote him a note to share places that I’ve felt this way – Chartres Cathedral, the Basilica of St. Servatius, the prairies of South Dakota, standing on the lands, farms, cemeteries of my Ancestors, the Temple of Dendara in Egypt ….. and more. Places where peace came strongly, emotions welled, and even occasions (at St. Servatius and Chartres) where “synchronistic” choir or evenson happened in what seemed like events just for us. The prairies of South Dakota help to remove my “horizon deficit disorder” from living in tree-enveloped Michigan, so that on the prairies at night, I see the Milky Way without interference or horizon to horizon of the land, the coming of a huge thunderstorm or the gentle lilt of a meadowlark.

You’ve probably felt this too? Places that were so special that you keep wanting to go back or live there or just dwell, even for a moment, to calm your mind and heart into a reality beyond this one (is this reality or just something temporarily created …. I’m working on that one). Let me know in your comments – always good to connect with fellow travelers in this way.

The connection to places, lands that my ancestors lived on, farmed, died on was fed greatly by our trip to Nova Scotia in the fall of 2023. I haven’t yet made time to write about it as I’m still deeply moving through the emotions of being there, finding their former lands, learning about the horror of the Expulsion of them by the English – forcibly sending them away from their beloved Nouveau France or Acadia – to places that weren’t Catholic, didn’t speak French and did not welcome them. A people in exile, trauma and forced separation …. it is painful in ways I didn’t expect. I’ll write about it someday but for how, standing on their lands, the ancient cemeteries, the Dauphin River (now the Annapolis River) – I felt things in my body, my emotions, that I’d never felt before. More later …

But in the meantime, St. Bart’s calls … and I must go. Watch for my future post about the journey there, ok? And let me know the places that call you – ancestrally, spiritually, specially!

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Your Ancestry May Not Be What You Think!

Source: Advice to White Supremacists: You Might Not Want to Test Your DNA

Thank you, Dick Eastman!

I was thinking, praying about these recent events and remembering some key times as a genealogist in California. I volunteered in a Family History Center as I could translate French and German and the Mormon volunteers had asked me to help out once per week.

As my contact with customers, through Lineage Journeys, evolved over the weeks and months of volunteering, we began to have a fairly steady flow of people from a particular area of town. Known to be descendants of those who migrated to California during the Dust Bowl era, they were descended from people primarily from Oklahoma, Missouri and a few from northern Texas. They came in, as one of them told me, “to document our superior family” …. hmmmm, “superior” equated to “white” and their conversation indicated that they were affiliated in some way with white/neo-nazi groups that I knewto be in the area.

It didn’t take long (perhaps three generations of ancestors) to find census records that indicated “mulatto” – the term used for mixed race individuals on the old census records. Explaining that to these research customers became my personal, silent joy as their visions of superiority were revealed for the arrogant falsehood that they were. Many of them stated variations of “the records were manipulated” or “the census taker lied” or any number of other ways to avoid the obvious.

The fact that “race” isn’t a scientific or biological fact anyway would have been lost on these families, and my personal and professional research experiences had long before shown me that our families migrated, lived in many communities, searched for jobs and good work, and married across religious and ethnic lines for centuries. No surprise here that some “white” people had relationships in the past that weren’t with those of European origin.