As an Australian witch I find it can sometimes be quite hard to connect with your spiritual side; there is that sense of not feeling connected to any one path, place or ancestor. This land is not the land of our ancestors at least not past 8-10 generations for those of us who are descended from convicts and those that colonised this land. This land belongs to a closed spirituality that we don’t often (if at all) have entrance to; and it can often make Australian witches feel very disconnected. Witchcraft is a very personal practice and that sense of connection is important to feeling linked to ourselves, our ancestors and Deities. My path, at its core is Hedgewitchery (I even co-wrote a book on it) with a foundation/focus in British and Irish Traditional folk magic but it has taken me a long time to find the path for myself that works.
When I first started practicing Witchcraft I didn’t really have any sort of structure to it, I just read a lot of books and applied that knowledge where it fit. I started off looking at Egyptian Deities (because what girl didn’t have the most absolute obsession with Ancient Egypt after learning about Cleopatra?) and more or less settled there for awhile but I never felt really connected to it. I loved the lore, the history and to this day, it holds a deep fascination for me but ultimately it wasn’t something that stuck. As I got older and I matured in my Craft, my interests began to change and grow and I wanted to feel that deeper sense of connection to my lineage, to my heritage. Inevitably I started asking questions about my family and where we came from. My family is quite diverse in some areas as to where they originate from and it consists of both convict and immigrant who found themselves in Australia in the past two and a bit centuries.
Following along that thought train, our family trees are fantastic places to start if we want to look to the lands of our ancestors for the spiritual path that might resonate. Now I am not suggesting that you can’t practice outside of your ancestry (unless it is a closed practice, that can become a tricky situation) or work with Spirits and Deities from distant and different lands (the Greek pantheon is hugely popular), however if you find yourself questioning where you belong or where to start, genealogy can offer incredible insight to where your family has come from and the spiritual practices of the lands they lived in. As I mentioned earlier, my ancestry lies predominantly in the UK and Ireland; both places have a very storied Pagan history so it makes it very easy to look into what practices come from both places. Digging deeper into it, each region also had a slightly different way of practicing so you could also incorporate elements of the regional folk practices of your ancestors into your own spiritual path.
You might be wondering how you find out this information. The easiest place to start is by building your family tree starting with yourself and working your way up. Several website such as Ancestry and My Heritage are popular and offer free trials before a paid subscription; you can start building your tree for free without using their resources and just using the tree function in their websites. They offer a
7-14 day free trial and it’s quite amazing how much you can get done if you’re really committed in that time frame.
There are free resources to research family members, they may not be as complete but can offer some direction to begin building on. It’s a bigger bonus if someone in your family has been keeping records and family trees and if you come from convicts – especially in Australia – the records are fairly detailed and there are several different websites where you can look this information up. I recognise this is not always accessible for everyone due to adoption, fostering and other circumstances that can separate you from your family so if this is an accessible option for you, it can help a great deal.
Another option, if funds allows, is getting a DNA analysis through a website like Ancestry or My Heritage; I know there are some arguments about the ethics of the companies that provide this service so it is entirely up to you if you want to do this option. Ancestry is quite good and they often have affordable sales around major holidays (Easter, Christmas etc) so it pays to keep an eye out. I purchased my kit during one such time because paying the full price was just not affordable for me at the time. I would also say that the results are not infallible however they do try to closely represent the area you have DNA most in common with. They update it yearly adding and subtracting results depending on how closely your DNA aligns with the top seven results of your test. There is the added benefit of being able to add your raw DNA data to other websites to get a broader spectrum result of your DNA ancestry. Not surprisingly, a vast majority of my DNA is showing as Irish, British, Northern European and Scottish – areas that my ancestors have come from.
From there you can also look into Ancient DNA to see where your lines originated from and you can even find out if you’re related to any known archaeological finds. My results closely align to the Celtic Parisi or more broadly, Britons which means I have a long connection to that land in the largest percentage. There are also sites like Living DNA that can also track your most recent historical DNA to show where the past generations of ancestors come from.
As you can see from my recent DNA, mine is fairly widespread over the UK; one thing to keep in mind though, is that all of these companies work from samples submitted so it may not be the biggest representation. An example of this is that I know quite a large contingent on my paternal side come from Cornwall and Devon. Devon is showing up as a small percentage and Cornwall is not on there. Another example of this is it is saying my recent ancestry is 100% European and while that is mostly true, I have two non European ancestry types that are present within the past two hundred years not showing up as "recent" but are present on my Ancestry results (and verifiable in my family tree) so be mindful of that. This is where doing your family tree helps, however again, if your family history is not accessible to you, DNA is a good way to see a broad spectrum result of your ancestry.
Once you have this information how do you go about using it to build your practice and connect with your ancestors? Looking at the results provided above for example, we can see that I have a large percentage of my recent ancestry in the South East of England. From there I could look into the regional folk magic practices of places in this area that correlate to family members in my family tree. If that is not available to me, I could look at the different counties and work from there looking at the folk magic traditions of places like Kent, Sussex, and the Isle of Wight and so on. Knowing from my tree that I have family from Cornwall and Devon, I could research there – Cornish and Devonshire folk magic has a long history and it quite easy to access literature about it.
While this may not be the way for everyone; as you may find that you don’t resonate with the spiritual practices of your ancestors and instead find that you resonate deeply with the traditions of another place all together, it is a good starting point. It is also a good place to begin when wanting to connect with your ancestors because their knowledge base will mostly be in the places they grew up, lived and died in. Ultimately however you build your path is going to be personal to you and the best way to create a spiritual tradition of your own is to work with Deities/Spirits that resonate with you.
Happy Researching!! Please feel free to share your own discoveries in the comments and how you incorporate your ancestral connections into your practice.
Here are some resources both paid and free to help you if you want to learn about your ancestry.
Websites that are paid: Ancestry, My Heritage, 23AndMe
Websites that are free: WikiTree, Family Search
Resources for Australians: Australian Royalty, Trove, State Births/Deaths/Marriages
Paid websites with additional DNA: My True Ancestry, Genomelink
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