"The one whose solitary boast is his lineage, has no descendant of any virtue."
___ Welsh proverb (trans. CM )
The Celtic peoples honored the keeping of remembrance, and repetition of genealogies and family lists. Such genealogies were 'memory resident' in bards and poets, one of whose chief tasks was to recite these ancient lineages on important occasions. In our society, we generally leave such matters to the professional genealogist or herald, and so our own memory dwindles. As a result of this neglect, strange obsessions sometimes develop. People with no knowledge of their lineage sometimes invent family trees or make outrageously unsubstantiated claims regarding their descent. Such acts have a terrible pathos about them. At the other extreme, we find those who dine out on their ancestral achievements without any attempt to make their own mark. Both they and the people who invent their lineage fall into the trap of ancestral dependence. Whether actual or invented, our lineage is a path that moves through us to our own descendants. Our physical bloodline may have many great and good ancestors among its number, but their deeds do not flow through our veins or belong to us unless we make them our by similar doing.
Dependence upon the ancestors is often just a manifestation of laziness, a way of absolving ours4elves from total engagement in life; it is also a form of theft that robs our hard-working ancestors of their credit. We cannot live in the reflected glory of ancestral honors without absconding from our own lives and missing the very real opportunities to become worthy ancestors in our turn.
"Honor your ancestors, known or unknown, by a worthy act of your own."
[From The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]
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