#ancestory

Destined

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Photograph: Tacitus Dean

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"I have often wondered if the sadness that haunts me is not my own, but something that has been passed down through generations, an inheritance of sorrow that I carry with me. It is a sadness that I cannot fully understand, a sense of loss that I cannot explain. It is as if I am mourning something that was taken from me long before I was born, a grief that has been passed down through the ages, from parent to child, until it has become a part of me, woven into the very fabric of my being."

W.G. Sebald

Photograph: Tacitus Dean

(Translated excerpt from my grandmother's book, from chapter 1: the early life of her mother's grandmother.)

I'm still at the very beginning of this project, and it has already brought me to tears plenty. These women, whose names would never appear in history books, whose lives would never be studied by historians, they deserve to not be forgotten. Their stories deserve to be told. Everything they had gone through should not simply be lost to time and erased from history forever.

I should speak some Welsh

for a moment connecting

to an ancestry

lost to migration, culture

once a legacy

that had every memory

stripped and peeled just to fit in.

.