Somehow, pathworking Sorath for over a year now has lead me into an autistically deep dive of ancestor and geneaology reasearch, work, healing, veneration, and connection. I thought I would put together my top 10 list of the wildest things I have discovered thus far.
- Given the geographical density of my ancestry coming from Subcarpathian Poland, Transcarpathian Ukraine, and Transylvania, I joked that my geneaology reasearch would yield a vampiric lineage... so anyways we have numerous DNA connections to the Bathory family (Blood Countess Elizabeth) and the Draculesti (Vlad Drakul III) via the Hunyadi and Corvinus lines.
- It is really profound to be able to do Saint AND Ancestral veneration at the time. We have two known genetic connections to the Rurik Dynasty (Princes of Kyiv and Princes of Novogorod) that are direct descendents of Saint Olga of Kyiv - whom is my favorite Saint and one that I have worked with the. most.
- Thus far, I have three ancestors who were involved with the Salem Witch Trials, one was accused, but I don't remember her name, John Alden Jr. was accused, jailed, and aquitted, and Rebecca Nurse who was executed.
- The song "Witchy Woman" by The Eagles is written about another ancestor - Zelda Fitzgerald wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I have been learning more about her and how our lives paralleled.
- US President Dwight D. Eisenhower is a distant relative and so he is wife Mamie Doud Eisenhower from the same side of the family. Eisenhower via my maternal grandmother and his wife through my maternal grandfather. Bonus fun fact: My first husbands grandfather was the British technical attache to Eisenhower during World War II.
- Most surprising distant genetic cousin: W.E.B. DuBois
- DNA relative I am really sociopolitically proud to be related to John Brown. Yes, that John Brown.
- One of my 10th or 11th generation great grandfathers married William Shakespeare's daughter.
- My great grandparents town in Subcarpathian Poland was liquedated by the Soviets in 1954. They burnt everything to the ground and relocated the residents into Soviet Russia. It's weird to think their ancestral land was burned to the ground, yet the house they built here still stands and is our ancestral land.
- My Materal Great or Great Great Grandfather fired the final shots of the Civil War