Invisible pull towards ancestral roots?

Several odd coincidences have happened to me.
I was an art student in Norwich and loved to sketch in the surrounding villages. 30 years later, studying my family tree, I traced my 3 x g parents to one of those villages. I had no idea at all until seeing it on the 1851 cesus as a birthplace.
Now I find I am living a few miles from where another ancestor had emigrated from in 1830.

Until the mid 1800s my ancestors were all living in rural areas and mostly working on the land. I love those places and definitely feel comfortable and happy when I'm there. But then (with the Industrial Revolution) they were mostly forced to move into the industrialised city areas which are not so nice to visit today. So I don't feel the same there! But then you could say those areas are not where their roots lie, so maybe that is the reason.

Reported

Message deleted by Gransnet. Here's a link to our Talk Guidelines.

Genealogy can throw up all sorts of surprises, some very unwelcome and with DNA testing these days even more so.
Dads ancestors were farmers quite closeby, most of his male forebear's emigrated to the colonies in the early 1900s. Over the years we have had quite a few visits from far flung places.
Mums family goes way back to 1066 a very well known name, you would recognise it, when I knew granny she was married to the publican of a spit and sawdust pub near Liverpool. Her first husband was a school teacher who died early in the 1930s leaving her with 6 children that must have been tough.
Researching her family is endlessly revealing lots of important characters also rouges. A few months ago I came across the name in connection with Barbados, researched that and in the early 1700s they were plantation owners, with slaves, soldiers, ship owners and probably pirates as well, all over the Caribbean. I don't intend to do DNA research on that lot.
So be fully prepared to dig up a lot of skeletons, the chef Ainsley Harricott was on TV and his well to do granny turned out to be a brothel owner.

grumpa ?

I have felt strangely drawn to three buildings in London where my great-grandmother worked, and in one of which my grandmother was born. Mind you, they are all pubs.

Looking at my results on Ancestry DNA. I am back in the sort of area most of my ancestors began.
Leicestershire on my mums side. Cheshire and the Welsh borders on my fathers side for most of the 1800s' and the mid 1950s. My father's side had some Scottish and Irish blood .
We are very much from theBritish Midlands.
Via Northhamptonshire and Bristol for many years and ending up back in Cheshire. We have not strayed far.

We now live where my husbands ancestors lived around 200 years ago, no idea until we did our family tree.

I suspect it is entirely coincidental, but after a life of multiple moves, I have come to rest in a village only half an hour from where my ancestors lived for generations -starting from 1640.
I had no idea until recently. Distant relatives still live there.

Yes, LiltingLyrics, I think you are onto something. My father's family emigrated from Chichester to Australia in 1839. They had a thriving coach building business in Chichester. Settled in Adelaide. My English mum emigrated to Australia in 1951 and met my dad, descended from the Chichester family. I was brought up in australia until I moved to England 40 years ago. In England I have always lived where my husband chose. (Mostly Surrey). Dh's parents retired to Chichester about 20 years ago and I always hoped dh might one day choose to retire there too, although he always dismissed the idea. UNTIL 2 years ago when we started thinking about retirement. Guess where we now live???? Chichester! Very very close to where my father's family lived up until 1839. Love it here .... and there is a satisfying feeling of completing a circle.

It makes you think that maybe there is a genetic memory. I have researched my one line of my own family proven back to the 1600s which was lucky as they were a well documented family. Along the way marriages have brought other families to my family tree, many from different places. I have never had that feeling of belonging to any place when visiting some of the places during research. The only place that I really did come to love was Cuddington in Bucks which was the home of my husbands ancestors but nothing to do with me.

I believe there is something which connects us to our ancestors.

Thank you to everyone who is sharing their stories here in response to my OP. My logical brain tells me it's a romantic hypothesis but I can't help also thinking that there is something in this.

seasider have you watched Who Do You Think You Are? this week about Olivia Colman? A very interesting part of her ancestry rooted in India.

I have always wanted to travel.to India and will fulfil my dream later this year. I have never known my biological father but have just taken a DNA test that shows i am 44% south Asian (India, Pakistan) maybe I knew! I always feel at home in little gritty Northern towns that are like where I grew up .

Thank you Elegran, I think you're right. However, I thought I remembered that when foot and mouth removed sheep completely from northern fells, I heard a discussion concerning the loss of the sheep's ability to know their own grazing area and that this was a trait which was inherited. It seems I am wrong. We can't ask the sheep of course.

My parents were from southern Ireland and whenever I am there, it feels as much like home as the place where I was born and bred.

Azie I think hefting is learned behaviour. Lambs graze with their mothers on the bit of land which the mother learned earlier was "their" pasture and acquire a lifelong knowledge of the home ground - where the good grazing, the water and the shelter are. They pass that on in turn to their own lambs. If a lamb were removed from its mother at birth and raised elsewhere, it would not be familiar with the area.

I was born and bred on the Ayrshire coast but haven't been back for a good 20 years. However, in my dreams, it's still frequently there as my home.

I have certaintly experienced the opposite

No I ve never had any coming home feelings, not doubting anyone that has but just like believing in ghosts (which I don’t) I guess I don’t have the sort of emotional brain that clicks in to the imaginative bit, I think my brain whatever is left is too practical

Hello LiltngLyrics, I've done a fair bit of family history and have been fascinated by coincidences of places, events and names and also by tales I've heard. I once listened to a radio programme about someone who bought a house that he later discovered had been owned way back by one of his ancestors!

On a personal note, I've always been drawn to Devon and discovered that I had ancestors from there. I also went and explored the area in Ireland where my mother's family originated from and found a huge sense of coming home. I almost seemed guided to some places.

If sheep can pass on knowledge of home ground, I don't see why humans can't too. It does annoy me when people use logic, eg probability, to dismiss intuition or other forms of knowing that science simply hasn't been able to discover yet. We now know that the bits of our genome that were previously dismissed as rubbish contain, amongst other things, traits that were formerly believed to be unable to be passed on. Google epigenetic if you would like to know more.

I was born in south London and have lived in various parts of London and England, some of which I liked very much and some (including Suffolk) that I wasn't at all keen on. I feel I have an affinity with London but I'm also very drawn to Sussex.

I'm not sure it's about "roots" but just about the places where you are or were comfortable and happy.

I was born in Manchester and met my husband, who was born in Bolton, in East Anglia. Imagine my surprise then when I researched our family histories and discovered that our great grandparents lived on the same street in a tiny Lancashire village at the same time - they are two pages apart on the census.
Unfortunately for your theory I have never visited the place, but do have some curiosity about it.

I'd love to know if any of me forebears were from the north east coast. I was born and brought up in Cumberland. Each summer our Sunday School did an outing to the seaside. Usually we went to Whitley Bay, Seaburn or South Shields. The nearer we got to the coast, the more I felt I was coming home. I still feel this way now.
As far as I know though, all my ancestors were farmers or miners. My cousin traced part of our family tree back to the 1600's and they all came from north Cumberland.