Tag: ancestors

A CLASH OF CULTURES IN OUR GENES by Carol P. Christ

I carry the exact replica of MDNA handed down from mother to daughter since the depths of the last Ice Age 17,000 years ago.  My father carries  the YDNA of the Indo-Europeans handed down from father to son since the time when his male ancestors invaded Europe about 5000 years ago.   

My female ancestors moved with the seasons as they gathered fruits and nuts, roots and greens to feed their families. Some of them may have blown red ochre around their hands to leave their marks in ritual cave-wombs.

Mitochondrial DNA is passed down exclusively from mothers to their children. My MDNA “T2b” was given the name “the clan of Tara” by Bryan Sykes in The Seven Daughters of Eve.  According to Sykes the earliest female ancestor with this gene lived about 17,000 years ago, perhaps in Tuscany. Continue reading “A CLASH OF CULTURES IN OUR GENES by Carol P. Christ”

I am Beginning to Understand by Carol P. Christ

Elizabeth Kelly Inglis died in 1927 at age 62 from complications of a stroke. Secondary causes were malnutrition and exhaustion.

When I was a child, my father, though he was very close to his own parents and sister, spoke very little about his ancestors. I knew that both of his parents lost their fathers when they were small children. I was told that the Christs were German and the Inglises were Scottish and Irish. My grandmother Mary Inglis Christ was as Irish as the day is long. She prayed to the blessed Virgin and took me to church with her in the early mornings where she lit candles and whispered the rosary while fingering faceted lavender beads. She voted for Kennedy because he was Irish and Catholic—to the horror of my father and his father who had no use for the Democrats. My grandmother sometimes cried when she showed us photographs of her family, especially when she pointed to her sister Veronica, called Very. I sensed that my grandmother felt sad to have left her family in New York when she moved with her husband and children to California during the depression, but I was too young to understand fully. As far as I know, I never met any of the relatives from her side of the family, even when I moved to “back east.” Continue reading “I am Beginning to Understand by Carol P. Christ”

Body, Nature, Ancestors by Carol P. Christ

Some years ago, womanist theologian Karen Baker–Fletcher asked about ancestors following a lecture I gave on the body and nature.  I have since come to realize that ancestors are a missing link between the two:  we cannot speak adequately of embodiment and interdependence in the web of life without recognizing the ancestors whose lives made ours possible.  Our mothers quite literally gave us our bodies.  All of our ancestors gave us their genes.  Care and callousness with origins going back longer than conscious memory was imprinted on the psyches of our parents and grandparents and transmitted to us.  All of our ancestors give us connections to place.  While many black people in America can recite oral histories that begin with slavery in the United States, I come from a family where stories of origin for the most part were not valued or told.  Both of my father’s parents lost their fathers when they were very young, and my father, who was raised Catholic at a time when Catholics were discriminated against, preferred to think of our family as “American now.”  Like the hero of the film Lost in America, most members of my family dreamed of “melting right into that pot.” In the process we lost stories we need to help us to understand ourselves and the complex realities that “becoming American” involved.   Continue reading “Body, Nature, Ancestors by Carol P. Christ”