During Retreat, many of the attendees received a message that the Akhu, or ancestors, are feeling a bit lonely and want more attention from their descendants. Conveniently, every sixth day of the Kemetic month is marked as a festival for the Akhu, according to the Kemetic Orthodox festival calendar. Today just happens to be the sixth day of the month. To keep up with my personal promise to keep my Akhu fed and happy this year, I will try to post something about my ancestors on every sixth day festival. It might be a story about a particular Akh, or information about what I’ve been doing to honor them lately, or anything I can think of to share about the ones I love in the Beautiful West.
I think it is interesting that the Akhu are feeling unattended. Just before Retreat, I launched into a flurry of Akhu-activity. I found the names of two hundred of my ancestors, up to second cousins. I also have information about many of my living relatives, whose relation to me I have not always fully understood. Family is a very complicated thing to understand. It is never as simple as we would like it to be. In my family, there are quite a few convoluted branches. My grandfather’s mother was an interesting woman. Nobody seems to be able to deduce when she was telling the truth for certain. What I know is that she was a burlesque dancer – but I’m not even certain about that anymore. She married my grandfather’s father when she was young (he was allegedly a musician with whom she worked), but then divorced him, and married another man. She went by her second husband’s last name, but my grandfather went by his biological father’s last name. For the longest time, I couldn’t tell who was related to who! There were too many surnames floating around my family tree for me to keep track of them all. I have been working on sorting out who is who with more definition, and now I feel like I might have a bit sturdier of an understanding.
Tonight, I will offer my Akhu cool water and bread, light their candles, and read their names. I will also reflect on the ancestors whose names I do not know; they are no less beloved that those Akhu I can name. I’m sure my great-great-great-great-great grandmother is somewhere in the Duat watching over her descendants. 🙂
carrying their light 
I’ve had a lot of success using ancestry.com to make my own family tree. If you pay you get access to a bunch of censuses, social security records (up to a certain year of course), and other such records. I did a 14 day free trial.
We have been using Ancestry.com as well as the resources at our local public library. The problem that we have run into is that the information we have to search is incorrect. My great-grandmother gave us the wrong name for her first husband (my grandfather’s father) – we started to get suspicious after finding some contradictory records, and then confirmed when we found her marriage certificate buried in a folder of files! LOL!
😛 That’s the problem with family myths: sometimes it’s hard to parse out the truth from the fiction. Good luck on finding more information!