Ancestry

This is the perfect time of year to search for ancestors and knowledge of your family tree and family history. If you know how to listen, you can pick up when your ancestors reach out to you. How they do that depends on your sensitivity, your favorite forms of communication, and how urgently they want you to have the information.

Tonight I have discovered several things about my family that I did not know. Not all of it has been confirmed on this plane- I am still searching for evidence and records of certain things, but when you hear "Medici" whispered on the wind (or shouted loud enough to wake you from a nap, ahem) and some digging shows that one of your ancestors was a member of the Medici court, well, that's confirmation enough for me. I'm not claiming the Medici family as my ancestors, just sayin that's how we got onto this topic tonight.

More funtastic information has come to light on my Mother's side of the family. My Maternal Great-Grandmother's surname dates back to before the renaissance. My Maternal Great-Grandfather's surname originates, not in Naples, as I had believed, but in Sicily, specifically in Enna. I've always felt that my connection to Sicily goes beyond adoption, but I thought the connection was conferred from the family tradition I was brought into. Nice to know there's a blood connection as well.

I've also found an alternative version of the history of my own last name which not only connects it to a Templar (which the last round of research did) but discusses Templars as being rooted in the Fratres Arvales, which I blogged about the other day. Gotta love synchronicity. The author of this piece also goes on to talk about an Etruscan connection to the Paternal side of my family. Absolutely none of this is confirmed at all. I thought my last name had Greek origins and a fun legend, but this distant relative has come up with something else entirely, which I find fascinating.

Tonight my family tree has been flipped horizontally. I thought the Etruscan connection was on one side of the family, and the Sicilian side on the other. Since little of this has been confirmed by mundane research, I will take the information back to the ones who inspired tonight's search and ask for direction:

Why do I need to look here now?
Which resources can point me towards further information?

I will start with a tarot spread and likely add a pendulum reading as well.

Anyone else out here doing this kind of work? Are you communicating with your ancestors at all? More now than usual? Do you seek them out at this time of year?