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

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

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

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

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

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

My maternal great-granduncle and I in his home, Western Kazakhstan, 2025 Below is the list of questions I used to interview my grandfather, my father-in-law, and my great-granduncle. They’re the foundation for how we trained the Oracle to interact with users. Navigating these interviews meant navigating a map of the world. Each branch of the family brought a different linguistic challenge. Hugi’s father is Icelandic, but his English is great, so those conversations were easy.

Me in front of a Christmas tree, Czechia, circa 1995 As a third culture kid, I got comfortable with always being the 'exotic' one at various stages of my life. Like I'm supposed to represent to the questioner an archetype of my 'real culture' which is frankly transient. I learned how to be a cultural chameleon and be comfortable in various settings. As I grew older, I realized that being an expat is where I feel most comfortable. And that's perhaps how I ended up living in St

The last page in my grandmother's book was handwritten, a 188-page chronicle. The entry is about her memory of being young and hardworking in the field, noticing perdix (a small gamebird), and how they were covered in dirt. She gently caught them and started cleaning them. Their parents were observing her in panic, but as soon as she released the chicklings, they ran towards their parents. The mother perdix seemed to nod as in thanks for the help. I received a diary from my g