Ancestors’ Day
Parentalia
Scattered Kinfolk Bring to Life the Ancestral Tapestry
About Ancestors’ Day
Ancestors’ Day is your invitation to connect with the people who made you, literally. Forget the vague concept of heritage. Today is about names, birthplaces, paper trails, whispered stories, and maybe even scandalous marriages you’ve never heard about until now. You’re rebuilding the branches of your family tree and perhaps discovering things about yourself along the way. Step one: start your tree. We recommend ancestry.com, which has a free version to get you going. Step two: make some calls. Reach out to parents, cousins, grandparents, siblings, old neighbors, anyone who might hold a missing piece of the puzzle. Step three: go deeper. Trace the migrations, the occupations, the surprising turns. Upload documents as you find them. Build something that future generations can carry forward when you’re gone. Genealogy is your opportunity to become one of the stewards of your family’s communal memory.
Ways to observe
(A) Low effort
Start a family tree on ancestry.com, Family- Search, or even a notebook. Add names and birthplaces. Let it grow from there.
(B) Recommended
Call a relative you haven’t spoken to in a while and ask what they know about your family history. Record the call (with permission). Add details to your tree. Share what you’ve learned with someone else.
(C) High effort
Host a digital or in-person “Ancestor Summit.” Invite relatives to contribute stories, photos, recipes, or documents. Scan everything. Assign research goals. Toast a great-grandparent you never met but now feel strangely close to.
Inspiration
Ancestors’ Day is inspired by Parentalia, the Roman festival held each February to honor the dead. Beginning on the 13th and lasting nine days, it was a deeply domestic affair: families visited ancestral tombs with offerings of wine, flowers, salt, wheat, and bread—humble gifts to keep the spirits of the departed well-fed and content. Neglect your ancestors, and you risked upsetting the balance between the living and the dead.
When I started tracing my own family tree, I half-expected to find a noble branch somewhere. A baroness at the very least. (This is what happens when you’re addicted to Hallmark Christmas movies.) Instead, I found a long line of Oklahoma farmers working under brutal conditions. Was I disappointed? Briefly. But pride replaced disappointment when I traced the line farther back and found the crossing to America. Thanks to modern genealogy tools, it’s easier than ever to trace the ancestral journeys that inform your personal journey now. What you get is part detective story, part soap opera, and wholly addictive. If you uncover a secret family in Ohio, be sure to add them to your Christmas card list.
Adornments
Watch
The Last Emperor (1987)
The Last Emperor traces the fall of dynastic China through the eyes of its final figurehead. Crowned as a child and imprisoned as a man, Pu Yi’s life unfolds as a parable of faded grandeur in this lush epic.
Coco (2017)
On Mexico’s Day of the Dead, young Miguel accidentally crosses into the Land of the Dead and meets generations of his family beyond the grave. There he learns that remembrance is literally life-saving. If the living forget you, you fade away forever.
Listen
Kilkelly, Ireland by Danny Doyle
An achingly beautiful folk ballad based on real 19th-century letters between an Irish father and his emigrant son in America.
Cat’s in the Cradle by Harry Chapin
You already know this sad, beautiful cautionary family saga.
Read
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
An epic historical novel that follows four generations of a Korean family, from humble beginnings in a Korean fishing village in the early 1900s to the complex immigrant experience in Japan through the 20th century.
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Born into a mid-20th-century Black family in Michigan, Milkman Dead feels spiritually adrift until he embarks on a quest to discover his ancestral legacy.