We Are Products of the Ancestral Imagination

The paradoxes of ancestry and the metaphors we use to understand them

This year the ‘festive period’ (ugh) has conspired to place the topic of ancestry front and centre. Members of our family bought each other Ancestry DNA kits which, allegedly, will cause a few skeletons to come tumbling out of the closet. And I discovered that my father has been secretly building out our family tree, tracing it back to the 1500s and rev…