Honoring My Family History in Story

This is a photo of my 2x great-grandparents Hiram King Wicker and Emma Angeline Whitcher. I adore them. The genealogy work we have done shows them to have had fascinating lives, courting just after the civil war. They feel alive to me. 

My father and I have spent decades studying our family history and we have well over 1700 names of our known ancestors. It led me to develop a strong spiritual Ancestor practice as a means of honoring where I came from to better know who I am. And some of that shows itself in my work. 

[Don't be disheartened by my nutshell if you don't know your own ancestors or have a way of knowing them. I work with a lot of people who were adopted on ways of connecting to your line spiritually. You can still honor those who came before you without names. And you can honor a chosen line rather than blood. But I tangent away...]

Ancestors. Having so many of their names I wondered what I should do with them.

I created a catalogue of first names and surnames and I draw from them when I name characters in my stories. Sometimes it's a first name or a surname. Sometimes it's a main character or a small side character. 

It's my way of remembering of them, of pulling them into the present, however best appropriate to the story. There is always the ghost of my ancestors alive in my creations. Every time I finish a story I light a candle and thank the ancestors who inspired that name, for having had lived and continuing the line that ends in me, that I am alive to tell my stories.