Home | Ancestral vision

About

Ancestral Vision is interactive research, an ongoing, ever-evolving process, and a 'life game' that explores the family history of a couple: a family itself. It integrates it with history and emerging technologies to preserve, make accessible, and make 'alive' their complex ancestry and family tree.

We draw inspiration from recent and ancient traditions people have used to tell the stories of where they came from, such as family chronicles, heritage songs, parish registers, mnemonic artifacts, amateur genealogy, scrapbooks, and photo albums, as well as from personal resources.

Timeline

Due to the complexity of the project, we divided it into 6 parts.

Concept

As the first step, we created a realistic project timeframe.

Defining Scope

Evaluation and analysis of the preferred strategy.

Ideation

The fun part of going wild with emerging AI and technology, brainstorming.

Execution

Defined ideas and action plan, role divisions.

Research

What can be done, with whom, budgetting.

Presentation

We have decided to create a website to document all the processes.

Grandmother's Diary: Deciding What to Remember

My grandparents' wedding day, Moravia, 1960s I would like to write about how to process dark family history, but after working on Ancestral Vision for over 3 years, I realize I still don't have all the answers. During one visit to my grandmother, probably around 2018. I have asked her to write down family memories. I had learned that she had written it and left me 188 pages of deeply emotional memories only after she had died. I always thought we'd talk about the content of h

Gabriela Prochazka

Apr 123 min read

The Family Tree as Living Memory: How Rituals Keep Our Ancestry Alive

Screenshot of the Oracle interactive entity that holds all the information about your ancestors. by PhD candidate Gulzan Dossanova Introduction: More Than Just Names on Paper When we think of a family tree, we often imagine a static chart—a dusty record of names and dates used to trace biological links. But from an anthropological perspective, a genealogy is much more than that. It is a dynamic, living structure that we constantly recreate, interpret, and update through our

Gabriela Prochazka

Apr 42 min read

Rituals among Kazakhs: between tradition and modernity

Yurt in the Kazakh steppes. Photo сredit: George Frost / Library of Congress by PhD candidate Gulžan Dosšanova Rituals are a key element of Kazakh culture, linking the past to the present and strengthening social ties within the community. Many traditional customs and traditions still persist; some are being rediscovered, and others are practiced in altered forms. In this paper, I will focus on the types of rituals from the funerary complex in Western Kazakhstan, around the

Gabriela Prochazka

Dec 30, 20248 min read

The Materiality of Memory: From Ancient Skulls to Digital Spirits

Reflection on the search for physical and spiritual representation Figure 1. Plastered skull from Beisamoun, PPNB, on display at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem The Human Tether When I began exploring the concept of ancestry, I found myself circling around one specific obsession: Across every era of human history, we have refused to let the dead simply disappear. Instead, we’ve used our hands to pull them back, carving their essence into pendants, sculptures, and masks. It's abo

Gabriela Prochazka

Nov 3, 20243 min read

DNA Testing: Who Am I? (Hint: Still Don't Know)

Hands of my grandfather, Photo by the author. Shot on a Mamiya 645, 50mm. Western Kazakhstan, 2025 I recently did what millions of others have done: I spit into a plastic tube, mailed it to a lab, and waited for an email to tell me "who I am." When the notification finally popped up, I expected a moment of profound clarity. I thought I’d finally see a straight line back to the people I’ve been researching. Instead, I got a pie chart. The Pie Chart Problem There is something d

Gabriela Prochazka

Oct 10, 20243 min read

The Detective Dilemma: Why I Didn’t Hire a Professional

First page in the grandmother's handwritten 188-page family chronicles, which is the main source of information on names and dates on my paternal side. The first page says: Family Chronicles, how we was it growing up as children, and then later in life! When you start digging into your roots, you eventually hit a wall. For me, that wall was built of old archives and a lot of bureaucracy. So I looked into hiring a professional family detective -someone who could bypass the hea

Gabriela Prochazka

Oct 10, 20242 min read

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Grandmother's Diary: Deciding What to Remember

The Family Tree as Living Memory: How Rituals Keep Our Ancestry Alive

Rituals among Kazakhs: between tradition and modernity

The Materiality of Memory: From Ancient Skulls to Digital Spirits

DNA Testing: Who Am I? (Hint: Still Don't Know)

The Detective Dilemma: Why I Didn’t Hire a Professional