Sense of Soul - The Magic in Your Genes Your Personal Path to Ancestor Work

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

Today on Sense of Soul we have, Cairelle Crow, she has walked a goddess path for more than 30 years, exploring, learning, and growing. She has been involved in genealogical pursuits since the late 1990s and began to actively work with genetic genealogy in 2013. She is the owner of Sacred Roots, which is dedicated to connecting people to their ancestral heritage and legacy, and she lectures locally, nationally, and internationally on the blending of genealogy with magic. She teaches the 13-month Priestess of Sacred Roots genealogy magic course and is also an integrative RN and midlife women's advocate. When she's not riding on a Mardi Gras float in her native New Orleans or roaming the world in search of grandmothers and stone circles, Cairelle is at home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.  In this episode we talk about the importance of connecting with your deep roots, and  about her new book The Magic in Your Genes: Your Personal Path to Ancestor Work (Bringing Together the Science of DNA with the Timeless Power of Ritual and Spellcraft.) Visit: https://www.cairelle.com/ Find + follow Cairelle online! Facebook: /IAmCairelle Instagram: @IAmCairelle Twitter: @IAmCairelle Check out Shanna’s ancestry mini series Untangled Roots at https://www.patreon.com/senseofsoul Learn more: www.senseofsoulpodcast.com Check out the Network of Lightworkers: https:// www.mysenseofsoul.com/sense-of-soul-affiliates-page New Affiliate Promo: https://louiseswartswalter.lpages.co/bay-masterclass/

Hello, my soul-seeking friends. It's Shanna. Thank you so much for listening to Sense of Soul Podcast. Enlightening conversations with like-minded souls from around the world, sharing their journey of finding their light within, turning pain into purpose, and awakening to their true sense of soul. If you like what you hear, show me some love and rate, like, and subscribe. And consider becoming a Sense of Soul Patreon member, where you will get ad-free episodes, monthly circles, and much more. Now go grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Today on Sense of Soul, we have Carol Crow.

She is an author, genealogist, and an integrative RN. And she's joining us today to tell us about her new book, The Magic in Your Genes, a unique book that combines genealogy and witchcraft, filled with magical tips and techniques to help the reader utilize both technical and magical resources as appropriate to the content in each chapter. Carol also included her own personal genetic genealogy testing results to explore her own magic identity and deepen her relationship with her ancestors. Thanks so much for joining me. I'm super excited about this conversation because my listeners know this is a huge part

of my journey and so dear to my heart. And then even more, you're also from New Orleans. So it's just divine. Thanks so much for being with me. Oh, I'm so glad to be here. So excited. I saw that you were from New Orleans. I was like, oh, this is going to be fun. Yes. Because there's no place like New Orleans. And when people, when you meet someone from New Orleans, there's just that knowing. Yeah. There's just a connection down there. The city is really its own entity. I think more so than a lot of other places, because of the history, the way that different peoples have congregated there over the 300 plus years that it's been

officially a place and something about that city, you can't crush it. You can't change it. People come in and they try to change things because it's a little too wild for them or whatever. It's like playing whack-a-mole. You try to civilize it here and it goes wild over there. You try to civilize it there and it goes wild over there you try to civilize it there and it goes wild over here they're almost their own culture oh because they have their own language right they have their own traditions unique to just them and they've really kept to them yeah absolutely new orleans is one of those places when you're from there whether you spent your whole life there or you were born there and you spent a few years there your people are from there, whether you spent your whole life there or you were born there and you spent a few years there, your people are from there. You just carry a certain something within

you. There's just a certain kind of magic that's in New Orleans. There's just a vibe that's there. It's really indescribable, but it's so much more than Mardi Gras. It's so much more than Mardi Gras. And Mardi Gras is fun. Don't get me wrong. I love Mardi Gras. I ride in muses. I still, I it's a, it's been a big part of was growing up for me and my kids and my grandkids. And, but it's so much more than that, but it's just the people that are so rich in culture and this inner knowing of all sorts of things. Just the magic that's there is so, it's just so deeply ingrained in the people. Even if they don't consider themselves magical people, they are magical people. I think a lot of other places also have that energy, but it's untapped. And I think in New Orleans, the lid's off of the jar. You can't put that lid back on that jar.

So it just flows out into the world. And I think that's why it's so renowned worldwide. Yeah. Yeah, its roots are very deep. And that Mississippi River, for myself, I owe my life to that Mississippi. And when people describe New Orleans just like you did, it's like, you're speaking directly to my heart and my soul. I cry when I get there because I know I'm going to leave. Yeah. So I am 56 years old and I just left my city. Our whole family actually is

relocated to Virginia. And so my father is from up here and my mother's family is the one from New Orleans and it crushed me. It really did. And I think about now, we're not unhappy here. New Orleans is a wonderful city. It is also a very hard place to live right now with the storms and the crime and the schools for my grandkids. And our oldest daughter got an offer for a transfer for her job in DC and it just went over from there. Yeah. Tumbled along and we're all here now. It happened in less than six months.

It just snowballed and dominoed. And so we're here in this beautiful state and we just bought a house here and we had been traveling around for the last couple of years, but, and it's beautiful here. And I love it. It's different. Plus we have to have our sausage shipped in, which I can't tell you how much we have tried to find smoked pork sausage here. And I'm sure there's good smoked pork sausage here in Virginia. I just haven't found it yet. It has been a struggle. How am I supposed to cook red beans if I don't have any smoked pork sausage, right?

Or how do you make gumbo with no andouille? And so you'll find things here that are labeled andouille. They're labeled andouille that's not andouille and we're but we try it my husband and I are both like that's not no that's not and even things that say they're from like they sound like they're from New Orleans or whatever they're packaged

for people that are outside of New Orleans like the spices are less or the flavors not as intense, right? Because our food's really intense and spiced a certain way. There's even energy and history in that, isn't there? Oh, absolutely. Food in New Orleans is such an important part of the culture. And people think it's all about just, it's the food, but it's actually the history of the food that lends its magic to it because of where it comes from, the basis for red beans and rice and all the things that you do with beans after that are very cultural, like Hoppin' John.

And using rice with everything. Yeah, exactly. So my grandmother, bless her, she was so funny. She would not eat potatoes. She would only eat rice. And she said cultured people ate potatoes. That's what she used to tell me. Now, my grandmother was a very, very, but it was because of the association. And this carries over from potatoes being associated with Irish people and who were not considered to be of a higher class. And so,

well, that was even before she was really born, but that carried over to her and she would not make potatoes. Now she would make potato salad, but as far as mashed potatoes, if there was a choice, if we were having like a roast with gravy, there was not a potato in sight. It was always rice. Isn't that so silly? So much of that was in my family too. And they didn't know why either. She didn't know why. They never had a reason why. Yeah. She just knew that she was taught that she had this association with potatoes not being a quality food.

Just a pattern passed down unconsciously. Yeah, absolutely. And that's as silly as potatoes. Yeah. Yeah. Potatoes. And she had so many little quirks about just all kinds of stuff. I don't know. Like I could see looking back, I can see how various cultures were drained out of our tree, our family tree, our family and our tree's existence because of preconceived notions about race and class and what it meant to be worthy and how, just how if you painted your house a certain color. So one of the reasons why the houses, you see the little white clapboard houses all around, they're painted white. The color was pulled from them because it was very French and it was considered common.

So my grandmother was not allowed to speak French. The French people did not paint their houses in these bright colors because it was considered trashy. And so you see it in a lot of the Creole houses in New Orleans, the Creole based houses, a lot of color. And of course, that's come back now. It's a point of pride now to have an outrageously colored house. Yeah. For a long time, everything was white with green trim or white with red trim. Yeah. the connection with that thing that made you less than worthy in the eyes of society,

whether it was being from a mixed heritage or a French heritage or Cajun heritage, that's considered common. And so I look back at my grandmother and all these things that she tried to manipulate with the way that she did things. I don't have the typical, and I don't know that I ever really did because we were taught to we had to speak a certain way enunciate my my children laugh about that still because new orleans can be very slurry in its accent i guess whatever you have a slushy language and it has a lot of slang and like you say you heard you heard or hey, or hey, hey, what's up? Your mama now. All these words that kind of blow together.

You make groceries. Yeah, we were not allowed to speak that way. If I would have said make groceries coming up, I probably would have gotten a tap on the lips. Wow. And it was because she wanted to distinguish herself. That's just from years of being ingrained. Conditioning.

And conditioning that. Well, obviously she just from years of being ingrained. Conditioning. And conditioning that. Well, obviously, she saw a lot of fear. This was your grandma? My mother's mother, yes. My mom says that all the time. I knew, but we weren't allowed to hang out with them. Then to find out she was a Duplassus. My great-grandma and my great-grandpa were both from the Duplassus family.

And then never to know and to remember specifically not being able to hang out with them. And she never knew why. Yeah. So yeah, I guess that's one of the things that my mom remembers about being little. So the whole story of my foray into genealogy and whatnot, and it's just been such a ride. Yeah. They weren't allowed to go down the road, right? DTR. Nope. Oh no. You don't go down the road.

You don't go down the road. Down the road. Yeah. Down the road into Chalmette beyond delacro all of those places where and i looking back i didn't ever understand why because they were just people to me but looking back now it's because they were either black mixed all of these different non-white i'll just put it like that they just they, they weren't white or they all were white, but I don't know. Yeah. That have really persisted over the years that you still see shades of

this. There's just so many, and I can't speak. I can't speak to the experience of a person of color. I'm white. I grew up white. I identify as white. I am white. That's my heritage. But I have a niece who's mixed. That's how she terms herself. She's mixed. Her father is a black man. And I see what she deals with from within her own community about not being black enough and not being white enough on either side. And so it's just everywhere. And even within cultures that themselves are oppressed, there are also these, from what I can see, also these inner rumblings of shades of worthiness really is what it is.

Yeah. Generational issue. Yeah. Yeah. It is systemic in that way that it's passed out so i always hated that phrase i don't see color because you should see color and acknowledge that not everything is just this homogenous whitewash or whatever so like my brain kids do see color they do but it's, it doesn't carry that weight. They're just, they're friends and they don't. So I'm hopeful that with this younger generations coming up now who insist on not being taken

advantage of, not being pigeonholed into a rigid container. My grandson told me, he said, why do I need a label? He said, I'm a boy. I know I'm a boy. That's me. He said, but I just want to be myself. And why do you have to- Yeah. What's all these boxes I have to check off? Yeah. And of course, he's young. So of course, we all need to be categorized in some way at some point for some reason. And that's fine. But when it comes to, especially to genealogy, especially when you start doing research into genealogy and learning some things about history, it makes you really take a step back and look at who we are as a people, as a whole. Yeah. I think it's something everyone

should do to know where this body came from, where this DNA came from. Because as I did, my DNA began to light up. And it was the catalyst that pushed me into the place where I am today. It made space for me to receive more light and to move further in my genealogy and into my spiritual journey. So what was it that pushed you into this work? So the first exposure that I had to genealogy, it's funny, I was probably 11 or went to school, sixth grade. I liked a boy, came home and told my grandma about it. I lived with her a lot when I was little and I sold her his name and she said, who's his grandma? And I was like, I don't know who his grandmother is. And so I went to school. I said, my grandma wants to know who your grandma is. And he was like, I don't know her name. Only in Louisiana.

Who knows their grandma's name, right? When they're 11. I don't know. It's grandma or mama or whatever. So he goes home, asks his mom. He comes back with the sheet of paper. I bring it home to my grandma. And she said, you can't like him because he's your cousin. And I said, he is not my cousin. I know all my cousins. And she said, those are your first cousins.

And I said, what does that mean? And so she sat down and drew me a tree that went back to his great grandmother. She knew all these people, right? Yeah. We were like third cousins or not close at all. So if I had really liked him, it would have been okay, but too close for her, I guess. I don't know. And anyway, that was so, so I went back and told him we were cousins. He was like, and then we didn't like each other anymore as boyfriend and girlfriend. So it sparked an interest in me because I saw this tree and to me, it looked like a web. Of course, it looks like a spider web. And I thought about how it lit my brain up that we were all connected in some way. These trees would go back

and over and just create this massive web of humanity. And of course, I didn't have such eloquent terms for web of humanity back then, but I was hooked. And so I wanted a tree and I started making a tree for my family. And my mom has five older brothers and her second oldest brother, my uncle Wayne, was also a family historian and genealogy buff. And so when I got older, I worked with him and we built my mom's tree back, their family tree really far. And I was hooked. And so I did genealogy for years and years. And then my husband is adopted and we knew nothing about his family of origin. And so that's where the perilou, that's where I married me. I got you. So yeah, so there's no genetic tie there. Not recently. I do have a genetic tie

to the perilous but it's distant okay yeah so he i think in 2006 national geographic had their genographic project that they advertised to tell you about your deep ancestry so let's find out what you are who are he's got dark hair he's got blue eyes and that's what we knew right he's tall so there that was it and I sent it in and basically he was a European male it was not very yeah it wasn't fun like okay you're a white guy from Europe yeah so but I put it away but eventually that morphed into a test at family tree DNA right and I was I was like, okay, well, I don't, he didn't have any, there was nothing really out of that that kind of stood out to me with that. So I can set it aside.

And then in 2013, 23andMe had their test with health history, health traits. And I said, that would be really cool. Let's do that because we don't have, we have children and grandchildren, but no medical history for you. And I did that and it turned out he's a carrier for cystic fibrosis. And I was like, oh, I'm a nurse. So I've been a registered nurse for many years. And I was like, okay, that's not cool. I want to know more about your medical history, but your children don't have half of their health story. So I tested him on ancestry and I did an autosomal DNA test at Family Tree DNA. He was just there as a YDNA test. And it took me about 14 months, but I found his birth mother and she had been looking for him for 20

years. And I realized along the way that I enjoyed the puzzle. It was like a puzzle with a puzzle pieces around. And of course, I was so fascinated by his ethnicity. I said, well, let me test mine. And I tested myself and it was interesting. But my dad's from, my dad's family originated Pennsylvania and Maryland. My dad was born in Washington, D.C. So I didn't have the matches to southeastern Louisiana like I thought I was going to have.

But I was like, well, half of my DNA is from the more northern part of the United States. So I didn't think of anything about it. Well, then my mom wanted to test hers. She is very proud of her French heritage. And my uncle had done all this DNA work on the family tree. They had been to another family member's home in France. And just this whole heritage of being really entrenched in New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana. And when her test came back and I noticed there was a new match, my cousin was there

as a match. And I didn't log in every day back then like I do now. And I was like, oh, cool. There he is. And then I realized that he didn't match her as much as he should. So DNA is measured in centimorgans and certain relationships with people share a certain amount of DNA. So you and a child are going to share this amount of DNA. You and a sibling, if you both have the same parents, are going to share more DNA than you and a sibling that only share one parent.

And this is going to track down through subsequent generations. And that's how you can figure out these things. So long story short, my mom's match to my cousin indicated that either she or my cousin's father was not the child of one of their parents. I just didn't know which one. So this brother was deceased. Only his son was alive. I knew that was a half match. So I knew that my mom and this brother were half siblings based on her match to my cousin. And they were the oldest child and the youngest child. My mother's the youngest to six. This uncle was the oldest to six. So they're falling at either end of the spectrum of children over a 10-year period. And long story short, tested all the brothers, and my mother is not the child of the man she was raised with. That's her father.

So 64 years old, and it devastated her. It devastated her to find out that daddy was not her biological father. Now, of course, he's gone. My grandmother's gone. The one aunt who was around that might have been able to give information had Alzheimer's. So she was like 12 in her mind. She didn't know what was going on. Yeah, it was just, it was a mess.

I can't even explain how much of a mess that was for her. I think about it now and I just get emotional, I guess. I don't know. I've had clients who that's happened to while I was working with them. And you know what? None of my mom or her siblings have taken a test and need them to because I need to fill in some stuff. And I was just about ready for my mom's. My mom's birthday was yesterday and I decided not to do it, but I'm going to do it for Christmas. But yeah, sometimes. It's not a lot of times, actually.

We don't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So also, I was going to test my mother. I got in touch with my father. We were not very close. He and my mother divorced when I was three and a half or four years old. He moved back up north. And I did not have much contact with him,

but we got back together over genealogy, I guess, because I reached out to him and I wanted to correct some family stories that I'd heard about his side of my story. Of course, people have a family story. I tell them they have this family story, this narrative that they grow up with about how their family's comprised. And more often than not, they're either missing big chunks because they are focused on one line or two lines, the ones they're familiar with, and the rest of the story is left out. Yeah. So anyway, I talked him into testing. He couldn't, for some reason was not able to figure out how to spit in the ancestry tube. So I had to send

him to family tree DNA to do the swab. That was easier for him. His results came back and I, they were also not what I expected. Like I, there were certain cousins on there that I expected to see. They were not there. So anyway, I wanted to talk with him about it, but he went long story short, my father is also not the child of the man he was told was his father. There's a lot of this, isn't there? Yeah. So, so I had this big, glorious family tree and it basically got chopped off at the grandfather. So I basically, I lost about half of my years of work, years of work back multiple generations, just, just thousands of hours of work probably. And half of it was gone and I was pissed. I was so angry. I was like, how did this one was bad enough, but both, I don't know. I don't know many people who have a double NPE at their parents. So NPE, the non paternity event, which means that a child is not the

child of the man or neither of them knew right no nobody knew my mother was she was shocked she actually believed me because i i have fallen to that gently so yeah believe me she said there is no they're absolutely not that's got to be wrong you're wrong. Yeah. And so I actually had to contact somebody who's a well-known personality now on television, who was not at that at the time. We were friends on Facebook and I sent the amount of shared DNA to them. And she said, that is definitely a half relationship. And so she grieved so terribly and she felt so much shame. She said, I'm just a dirty secret. That's what she told me. And it was just so, oh, it was so bad. She was so close with her father. She was the only girl, the youngest, it was his baby kind of thing. She cared for him

when he died. And it was just so, it was so much. Yeah. And I was like, okay, what am I going to do? When she said, I don't want to know anything. Well, of course, that's the immediate response. But she did. And so I started working on it without saying anything to her and gently with her to jump in and join the search as well because she wanted answers. She wanted answers. And so it took me about 14 months and the help of a very generous gentleman in New Orleans who had an extensive family tree, he matched her DNA as somewhat of a close cousin, close enough to be able to help us sort. And he had extensive records. And with his assistance, with his extensive tree that filled in a lot of gaps for me,

I was able to figure out who her biological father was. My father was a bit more difficult. It took me almost five years because with him, I started out with one 60 centi Morgan match. That was my highest match, six zero, which for those who don't know, a parent child is going to share like a 3,400. And my started out with 60. So she's, and I'm still, I'm friends with her on Facebook now. She's a delightful lady in Australia. That was my first, that was my highest match for my father. We still don't know how we're related. Wow. I still haven't figured that one out. Yeah. Sometimes I'll be able to find like great grandparent, but I won't be able to find the actual parent. It's harder to find people today than it is to find people in the past. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I had this and I

realized along the way that during all this searching and upheaval and try to piece things back together, how much of my own personal magic I pulled into the process. I'm very, again, I wasn't consciously thinking about it in the beginning. Like a lot of genealogists, when I started out, and my uncle used to fuss at me all the time about it, I was very slapdash and threw things together without doing the amount of research that I should have to verify. Right. Yeah. All the beginner mistakes that people commit, because they're really excited. And they're like, oh, well, this Mary Smith.

Yeah, it just grows on its own. Is my Mary Smith. Don't trust that. Yeah. Yeah. So many mistakes. and they're like oh well this yeah it just grows in its own is my marriage yeah yeah so many mistakes and when i started searching husband's mother i was like okay i cannot waste time with this i've got to be very systematic so that's when i started reading about how to do it how to start a journal to keep track of where you've been. And then of course, my own personal prayers in petitions and candles and ancestor altars and just all these things that I worked with anyway, but it was really became meaningful for me. Now, I know that your grandma was probably not pagan.

No. She was probably Catholic. Yeah, she was actually raised Presbyterian. Okay. I was raised Catholic. She's, but she, my, one of my cousins is a priest and she, she, she went to Catholic church. My grandmother would go to any church really, but she was also a very hoodoo grandmother. So for a white lady,

she sure was involved in a lot of the cultural magic of New Orleans. So we went to, from the earliest I can remember, botanicas for oils and potions and fixed candles and charms and all these things. She had an altar in her home. Now Mary was on it. Now Mary was on it. The Virgin Mary was on it.

Yeah, I was going to say, I have all these things in my room right now. I'm looking at it. I've got the rosary, but it's also next to all of these candles, right? Because they light candles for everything. Most of the Christian practices are pagan. Oh, absolutely.

New Orleans is really funny in that the Catholic church is very not open or they're always the church. In New Orleans, things are just so mixed up. Marie Laveau was Catholic. Well, I have her in my tree twice. I actually have her in my tree twice because, well, her father father it was through her husband one way or the one that she was buried with glapion and yeah and then through one of my grandmothers she would have been a half sister yeah so and i was pretty sure to see that yeah well that's the thing as you see all these things about religion and spirituality were so mixed in New Orleans because so many cultures came to the table. People who were there not by choice, but by force and were in were a force to suppress their own spiritual practices.

And so they hid it within the confines of Catholicism. And so that particular blend is very prevalent in the city. And I think that so many women, my grandmother felt disempowered by the traditional church that can really be oppressive to women. And I think that she found her power in ways that other people have found their power and that was under the table. My read so i wasn't she would never have called herself pagan but she read cards at her table for extra money i grew up with that now she read regular playing cards that old french right yeah regular playing card deck she did that for if she that's how she made money kitchen table reading cards for people.

My husband remembers one of the first times he came to pick me up at my grandmother's house, there was a line of cars parked in front of our house. He said, I thought there was a party going. He said, who are all these people waiting in cars? And I'm like, no, they're here for readings. And he's like, what are you talking about? And it didn't occur to me until I was an older teenager that my grandmother was a very different sort of person. So I grew up with auras and card reading and work at an altar.

I've been rubbed down with an egg for healing. That was just my normal upbringing, I guess. I guess it's always been a part of me to be able to step outside of the confines of what's considered traditional. But traditional for who? Yeah, you're burying statues in your front yard. Right. She did things like you cut your hair only at certain times. You cut your hair if the moon is waxing and you want your hair to grow.

You trim it at the waxing moon. And so it continues to grow along with the moon. If you have a hairstyle you like, and you don't want to have to get it cut so often, then you cut it when the moon is waning. And so it stops, it reverses that growth or slows that growth. She's stuff like that. I remember her having clients sitting at her kitchen table and if they were going on too long, she'd give me the eye and do this with her hand. And I knew I had to go get the broom and turn the broom upside down on the wall on the other side of the person, like in the room behind them. So they would leave. And her little thing to me,

that was the signal for go flip the broom. And so that's what I grew up with. I didn't grow up pagan, but didn't I? Yeah. I remember being fussed at my whole life if I whistled in the house, because they said it would bring bad- My grandmother, you were not allowed to whistle. I know. And don't trust a man who whistles. That's what my grandma would tell me. And I'm a terrible whistler. I wasn't allowed to whistle. Yeah. I would like to know more about that. That's actually one that I would like to look up. But I think these stories are common for everybody. I think if everybody, when they sit,

and this is where a lot of healing comes in. So when you're able to sit with your family story and start to look back at the different, what are the things that you guys did that maybe were a little different? Like my grandmother wasn't allowed to whistle inside. There's a story behind that. I don't know. There's a story behind that. Whether, I don't know if it's an old superstition. I don't know if something happened to her with somebody who would, I don't, you don't know these things. So, and this is what I love about DNA is that people who are typically disenfranchised in

genealogy, people who are adopted, people who are descended from enslaved persons, people who are removed from their family scenario for any number of reasons, whether they choose to exit due to toxic dysfunctional patterns or whether they're ejected because of who they are, DNA can really bring a lot to them to the table of being able to look back. So you can still take pride in your heritage and where you come from and not have to engage with anyone in the living incarnation, right? Who's alive right now. So the people that are actively hurting, you don't have to be a part of this work. Hey listeners, so sorry for the interruption, but are you ready to make 2024 your year of vibrant health, increased energy, and monumental success?

Well, join me and my friend and prior guest, Dr. Louise Schwarzwalder, as we embark on a transformational journey together. She designed a Brain-Soul Masterclass specifically tailored for this year. Awaken your beautiful you, 5 secrets to ageless beauty and a sharp brain. The masterclass is your key to reclaiming your body's vitality, understanding the link between frequency and aging, boosting your energy levels, and feeling stunning from the inside out. Get ready to propel yourself towards your most exceptional year yet. But that's not all. Prepare to experience the

wonders of frequency medicine. It's going to be a blast. Sign up today at www.senseofsoulpodcast.com under the Network of Lightworkers. You can also find this link in the show notes. Now back to our amazing guest. It enables you to step back beyond these confines of these people, this current dysfunctional patterning, and let you step back into history. Now, of course, there's crappy people everywhere, even in the past. We like to romanticize people in the past. You didn't have a personal interaction with that, but you still descend from it.

So it's twofold. You can step back and you can look at the cultures that your family has come from. You can look at the things that they did and you can adjust your lineage by making sure that kind of thing doesn't happen with you. So one example that I like to give for myself is I come from a line of people who enslaved others. I am from South Louisiana. I am from New Orleans and I am white. I have enslaver ancestors and they weren't small time.

So it's an ugly legacy. I have Manuel Andre, who he was the first plantation, one of the biggest slave uprisings, which was not successful. And I have Ambrose, Heidel. Which is a Heidel. Yeah. So I have, those are all German coast too. My maternal line is German coast. Okay. We're probably related somewhere. Yeah, absolutely. You look at, if you descend from Heidel or Heidel, absolutely. But when you look at these ugly things, so what, I can't do anything about the past, people are like, oh, well, I didn't do anything.

I'm not responsible for that. But I do ask people to sit for a moment and I think about the wealth and position that my family gained by enslaving other people and how that has rolled down the line and the benefit that I get one from just being white to from being able to access things that other people couldn't can't access because of economic status or what and it was like well I'm poor and I grew up poor too I had a really tough childhood and whatnot but I I still carry privilege just in my skin. And so- That's fine. Yeah. And so- I always say that, that I am proof that white privilege is the thing. My family whitewashed.

Yeah. My grandsons on their other side actually descend from an enslaved couple. So my grandsons, wait a minute. So we descend from enslavers and the enslaved. I said, you got a double dose, honey. You descend on one side from the enslaved and the other side from enslavers and and i showed him on the censuses how you can see how they changed their color changed over the course of a few decades from black yeah to mulatto yeah white yeah and that was the most shocking thing in my tree to see i was so confused yeah exactly yeah it's hard and it makes it hard to find people this is all these layers of complication but the takeaway from this is that to sit with your tree to look at the history to acknowledge the history to acknowledge things that were harm that was done to others from the people in your tree.

And then to amplify the stories that are good for yourself too. I would never want anyone to feel bogged down by their heritage, but instead use it as a tool of empowerment for yourself and for others to make a difference in today's world. I believe not that my grandchildren walk through the world in an awareness of how much privilege they carry as young white men and how difficult it is for other people. And when they are able to, and it is needed, don't speak over other people who are speaking to their own experience. But if someone does need a voice to use their privilege to be the voice. And those are lessons that have to be learned over time. But with DNA and genealogy, it really does. It equals the playing field in a lot of ways for people.

And that is the main thing my book is about, is tapping into that and accessing the magic and the healing that can come from genealogy. So here you are, you've discovered these things about your family history and you're adjusting it now, you're putting it out in the open. And so your ancestors sing, right? They're not a secret anymore. So that energy gets to come out and you get to be proud of this instead of having to hide in the shadows. And they did these things because they had to, because they were looking to the future and wanted something better than the lot they were given because of their skin color. Yeah. They did what they had to. And you get to be where you are now because of that. And now you look back and find it and you get to lift them up.

It's beautiful. I feel for myself, they wanted their stories told. They wanted to just have, you said something, they wanted to just be acknowledged, right? They wanted that acknowledged that they never got. And truly, because there's so much of this, it's not just the Louisiana history, which does have a lot, but I have found that there's, my dad had Jewish in him. We never knew this. I have quite a bit of Jewish in me. There's also, like you were mentioning, Ireland. There's many cultures that had to hide their history for one reason or another. And this lives in you. And some of the patterns and the cycles that are running through people's lineages that have not been healed, sometimes that's all you need is just the acknowledgement.

And then all of a sudden it's, wow, learn their stories. And even if you can't learn their individual stories, I always say, look at the time where it was, look at the area that they were in, connect with what they were going through, the depression or wars, all these things affected the cultures that they were in. You just connect with that, brings such an awareness of what they had to go through. The fact that you had to travel months to get across the Atlantic and only half the people would survive because they didn't have the supplies and stuff to go that long and the weather and there was so many sicknesses. It's what almost makes you appreciate, gosh, I can't even believe I'm alive.

If one person made a right turn instead of a left, you wouldn't be alive. Yeah, absolutely. I look at the story of, so I've traced my maternal line back to my eighth great-grandmother here. She came to Louisiana in 1721 and was dead three years later,

but left behind many daughters, apparently. I've come down that maternal line. And the ship that they were on- It was on the first five boats. It was on the Lagaron. And it was one of the German pest ships. German ones, I was about to say. Yeah. You know what? I think we should also say is most people from Louisiana also come from the King's daughters or the casket girls. You had all of those women that were just gifted by the King for these men that were building the city. And there's a lot of those. It's shocking. Yeah. You can see some, if people

would just follow the history, that's what I tell them. There's so much information out there. And everyone wants to be related to someone. People like to be royalty. That's what I've found. Oh, but there's a lot of people that are related to everyone. They like to be royalty. And I'm like, well, if it makes you feel any better, you're probably descended from Charlemagne because everyone is descended from Charlemagne. People want their tree to have a notable person in it it's exciting to be in my i see a lot of requests to find which ancestors oh i found that not mine but i have found royalty they like to be related to i don't know politicians or celebrities or yeah presidents

presidents well that was one of the family stories that I was told that was inaccurate. So my grandmother's maiden name was Taylor. And the story that they had been given where they were descendants of Zachary Taylor, which I've later found out is not possible because that surname did not carry down because his male line did not carry forward for that surname to be passed down. So they come from another branch of society related to Ted Taylor, but not directly. And I see the connections too. So I was fortunate. I wasn't able to test my grandmother, but I was able to test her sister before she died. And I can see in my aunt's, my great aunt's DNA that she actually has a community with African-Americans in that circle

of Mississippi and Louisiana, like Southwestern Mississippi, right around Baton Rouge. Right, right in the Alexia area. They were from St. Francisville, that central, yeah, St. Francisville. Yeah, I have a line there too. Yeah. And so, but she doesn't have any African DNA. So what that tells me is that she's related to a lot of people who descend from her same lines, but they descend as enslaved, as descendants of enslaved persons, where she descends from and we descend from the other side. So that was interesting to me how much that you can use DNA to connect with

these events in time that happened. To me, that's just a really, just another little piece of the proof, for lack of a better word. Do you get aggravated, like I get aggravated, that so much of history has been left out in doing this work you really do learn true history and you're like wait why didn't I know about this I was told that my and my grandmother told me this that her grandfather was a supervisor on a plantation oh and i was like oh okay and then i thought about it later and i was like wait a minute supervisor really that's a nifty nice clean that was a nice name yeah and i was like what does that and he was not a nice man he was not a nice man yeah and so i have found his father they were really the i guess the epitome of the time white men landowners who used enslaved persons as labor and this story

twisted so in the family chain the family dynamic changed when a husband died and the family came south into barataria and then into west wego and then that's where the line shifts when my grant with her father and so that's when things shift is when they came south to the new Orleans metro area. And the family fortune shifted, the wealth shifted. And then he married my great-grandmother who was not considered to be equal because the Taylors were very Scots-Irish. They were wealthy. They were white. And my great-grandmother was a Fabre. She was from down the bayou and was not considered to be as quality. It's a class. It's a class thing. They judge people based on the class. So when my grandmother married my grandfather, who turned out to not be my grandfather, his father actually did not speak to him anymore because he married my grandmother, who was common. And so I think about that and I feel bad for her because she was ingrained and conditioned that the women, she was not good enough.

Her mother was not good enough. And it was where they came from. I wish that I could tell her, well, I look back at your maternity and it's filled with beautiful names and stories of people who travel, of a woman who traveled and came to the state to make a better life for herself. And it's not a bad story and they're not unworthy in any way but of course she's been gone for 22 years now i'm a lot older and a little bit wiser now and but um she's not around for me to say these things to her but i wish i could let her know that you don't have to do or say or feel these things about yourself because it's not right so there i did. I've done a lot of people's trees in Louisiana. And there's this one beautiful, but so sad, I can't even find it right now.

But she's from Louisiana. And she found in this old Bible, this letter, or just this note that her great grandma had wrote. It said that same thing, Harold. It said something about, I don't know if it was her mother-in-law, never accepted her, never liked her because she wasn't worth it. And it just, it made me cry cry and what was so powerful is her great-granddaughter who I work with she's in like her early 30s but it was so impacting to her to see this was a real thing and those words hit her heart so much her her DNA, right? That she found power in it though, because she knew that she needed to change that, right? She needed that to stop in that pattern. And she knows that she needs to find that self-worth, that love so that it doesn't continue. Exactly.

And that's what I see when I look at a tree. And this is what I can tell everybody. I said, at minimum, your this is what I can tell everybody. I said, at minimum, your tree is composed of people who survived at least long enough to create a child that would grow up to marry, to have another. And so you look at family trees that are just littered with infant deaths and child deaths. And the fact that all of these little creeks and streams have flowed down to you means just by the fact that you're here, you're grown and you're cognizant enough to be able to do some genealogy research.

That's amazing. You are a person of worth. And that's the whole, I think that's the whole thing for me is that what this can do for somebody who is maybe not feeling so great about themselves. Maybe they'll come from a terrible thing. Everybody has a terrible tree in some way. Everybody has a horrible person. Everybody has a family story that is unsavory. You might not even know about it. But the point is that you get to use this information to adjust the narrative. And that's your work. And that can be so healing. If you stop to think about the fact when you see, let's just say you have a horrible relationship with your mother.

She was abusive or cold or whatever she was. And then you start to look back in the lineage and you can see where this legacy comes from. It doesn't forgive it. It doesn't make it better. It doesn't mean that she couldn't have done better. But you can see where these and then you can think to yourself, I am not going to do these things. I am not going to do these things. I'm going to work to make sure that I don't do these things. And so this lineage

adjusts just a little bit. And that's even for people that don't give birth to children. So when you, everybody is an ancestor, whether you're an ancestor of blood or genetics, or what I call an ancestor of influence. If you don't give birth to children or have children with somebody, but you interact with any other people, the way that you interact with them and have an effect on them lends to their well-being and the way that their legacy passes down their lineage. And so you still have influence. And that's really important. like a child or something that wasn't theirs, they would bring them into their tribe and they would pray to their ancestors to please take them on. And when I think about that, it's like your family usually does, whether you believe in God or source spirit, whatever. But if you're adopted, they pray for you like they would if you were their blood, right? No difference. and so that spiritual it's like spiritual dna yeah that's the beauty for me i gotta show you this picture you'll love it so that same girl had sent me this hilarious picture

i wonder how long it'll take to show oh here it is i'm gonna have to share my screen. You're going to love this. Because she's also from Louisiana and I did her and her boyfriend's actually a suicide boy. He's Scrim or Scott or Snow. Okay. And they're young. They're in their late twenties, early thirties. And I love that this generation, right? I love that they're not conditioned and they want to know stuff like this. That is amazing. They want to know who they came from. They want to know the stories. And he had, Scott Arsenault had this one ancestor. She was known as this woman who went out and stopped the war. She went out with her big white sheet.

And yeah, just like the stories you can find are so amazing. And he was like, I can totally see a mom out there doing that during the middle of the Civil War, going out there saying, y'all better get off my property. Absolutely. Yeah. You can find these little nuggets of empowerment. Yes. Yeah. But honestly, just again, if you're really having a scratch, just the fact that somebody survived and thrived enough to give birth to a child that then gave birth, that you're in. Back then, yes. So many laws. It was really hard to actually, they had so many damn children back then though. You were saying your mom and dad came from a family of six? No, my mom was six. My dad was four. Four. Oh, okay. Four total. No, five. Look at this. Can you see this? Oh, yeah.

I have seen that. Have you seen that one before? It says, I knew signing up for Ancestry was a bad idea. Look at the bighorn God. That's amazing. That's amazing. But that's what it feels like sometimes when you sign up and you're like, what the hell is this mess? I actually descend from a couple. Their last name was

Saladay and they are from Ohio. And there was a vampire panic around that time. Oh yeah. So she was my fifth great-grandmother. Her name is Phoebe Chaffin Saladay. And she kept a diary and she wrote about her husband's family. So everybody kept dying, right? It was tuberculosis is what it was. They thought that the person who died would get up out of the grave at night and wander through the house and make people sick, not realizing that of course this is- Oh yeah. Right. Oh,

they disinterred. She writes the story. They disinterred this man, cut him open and pulled out his organs, burned them. And the whole family had to be there to breathe in the smoke so that they wouldn't get sick. And she remembers, recalls telling this and she got very ill from that thing. And

she said her husband became very frustrated with her, but soon thereafter was okay because she realized she was pregnant. And so he was more forgiving of her not feeling well, standing in this cleansing smoke of her brother-in-law's internal organs being burnt up in a fire. And so- It's crazy. Her husband was the only survivor out of his whole family. Everybody died. I was reading this and I'm like, okay, well, that's funny. This is a vampire story. And there's just a whole Wikipedia, a strange superstition. The family of Philip Saladay came from Switzerland,

bought and settled on a lot in the French grant soon after the opening of the country for settlement. Hereditary consumption developed itself in the family sometime after their location in Scioto County, which I don't even know if I'm saying that. The head of the family and the oldest son had died of it and others began to manifest symptoms when an attempt was made to arrest the progress of the disease by a process which had been practiced in numerous instances but without success. They resolved to disinter one of the victims, take his entrails, and burn them in a fire prepared for the purpose in the presence of the surviving members of the family. This was

accordingly done in the winter of 1816- 17 in the presence of a large concourse of spectators who lived in the surrounding neighborhood and by a major Amos Wheeler of Wheelersburg. Samuel Saladay was the one they disinterred and offered up as a sacrifice to stop, if possible, the further spread of the disease. But like other superstitious notions with regard to curing diseases it proved of no avail the other members of the family continued to die off until the last one was gone except george and george is my fifth great-grandfather oh my god they literally said hereditary yeah hereditary consumption yeah oh my Oh my God. Okay. Well, that's a chapter in my book about notable ancestors. And so I always tell people who were looking for somebody famous. I'm like,

I had no, this is a story, right? This is notable. So, you know, but I think what, again, I look to interesting surnames with the the history of the surname like i have one from cornwall it's named kivel oh yeah right it's very cornish and so i delved into that but i think the most notable thing of all is the common unknown yes i agree my entire tree who just lived their lives and had their children and went on. And so that's the most notable thing is that it led to me. Yeah. I love it.

I love that so much. I have to tell you one story I think you'll appreciate. So I worked at my best friend Mandy's tree. He used to be my co-host. We did find that she had Ann Pudiator in her tree. So she was the oldest of the Salem supposable witches. This lady was not a witch. She just happened to have two husbands that died, a lot of land. She had a lot of land, which made her a target. And she made soap, seriously.

This is the kind of shit we found. So we knew about Ann Pudiator, but then I had two Reiki students and they were sisters and they did the Reiki class together. And their last name was Putnam. And I happened to say, can I do your genealogy? I'd even offered it because I was very curious because the Putnams are... And plus I had this strange just vibe in me because it was the Putnam sisters, okay, that were accusers, the young Putnam sisters. And here I have sisters, okay? So it just was, I was feeling something strange in me. Sure enough, they have like literal direct line to not the sisters,

but the grandfather. And I was like, well, this is weird. So I did a Reiki three retreat up in the mountains and Mandy and the Putnam sisters, they both together. So here I have descendants of the accusers of the Salem witch trial and an

actual descendant of one that was hung. And I'm like, now I'm having goosebumps telling you this right now. I saw that it was so very powerful and actually other people that were there that I told also felt it was powerful. But I told Mandy, I told her several times and I told the Putnam sisters

several times, but for some reason, they would not hear me. They would not hear me. It was the weirdest thing in the world. And then even afterwards, I talked to them both and they're like, oh, really? Wait, I didn't understand what you were saying. Wait, what? That happened? What? And yeah, dude, that's why I was like, I even said to both of them, don't you think this is amazing? And they both were just like, they couldn't hear me. It was so weird. It was so weird, but there was something blocking them from hearing me. Yeah. One of the things I talk about in my book, energetic DNA, it's in our aura. So I think that a lot of people don't realize that you do not carry DNA from every single one of your ancestors. You're still descended from them.

But over time, pieces are like, you think about, you only get 50% from mom, roughly 50% from dad. So, and you unevenly inherit from their parents. Maybe you got your dad, you got 22% of your grandma and 28 or whatever, 28% of your grandfather. So these are inherited unevenly. Eventually you're going to come to a point where you don't carry DNA from an ancestor. Right.

But I think with collective traumas and with all these things that we pass down, we carry that energy with us instead. And so I think sometimes these energies conspire to protect us from what they might perceive as danger. Right, or I thought maybe because they hadn't really done the work. Like I did the work, but they hadn't really done the work. So I thought maybe because they hadn't really done the work. Like I did the work, but they hadn't really done the work.

So I thought maybe that was it. This information could be painful or harmful. And yeah, so I think this auric DNA that we carry. there are some people in the tree and like that are probably historical but yet they didn't pull at me but then i have this dude over here who like you said is the common right and i am so attracted to that story and for some reason i'm so like i even have a nickname for him right i'm so connected there's some key people in my tree that I have a very strong connection with. So when you say that, that makes sense. Did that happen for you too? Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. So I never understood in the beginning. I officially, in my mind, left the church when I was an older teenager, like 19 or so, because I felt very disempowered as a woman. I wanted a spiritual path. That wasn't for me. And so I tripped onto the goddess type path, right? The divine feminine. And that's where my path has meandered since then. And I was very attracted to stregheria, Italian witchcraft, to italy that was always the top on my travel list and it was very i didn't understand it because i didn't have any italian ancestors

my mother was like we are not italian that's another one she's well no your dad's definitely Well, after I found my mom's biological father, my grandmother is from Ustica, Italy. And so my mother has a significant amount of Italian heritage. People don't realize that New Orleans is very heavily Italian and very system. But within that group are the Ustachese, who are a very significant part of that. People don't realize that connection. I can tell by somebody's last name because I've done so much research if they have Ustachese ancestry. And so that was my grandmother. While I had all of this weight coming down on me. I think this pressing against me to be like explore. Right. When you meet people, I know this is for me.

Just is something I do now. I listen to them and all of a sudden I start to see and hear their ancestors. If I see a really strong woman and they're talking very strong, that's my go-to. Or if I see someone defeated and not standing in their power, I see their ancestry. It's just something that just hits me right away. Yeah, absolutely. So you can see traits that come down through people. My mom always says, my mother's a very smart lady, but she always says, I have my father's brains. My father was a brilliant man who made bad choices. But my mom tells me all the time, she said, you're so much like your Uncle Wayne. My mannerisms and the way that I speak and how I can be very brusque and I'm very out

there. But I'm like, it's probably my astrology. I don't know how much you know about astrology or do astrology. I'm a triple fire. I have a Leo sun and Aries moon and the Sagittarius rising. Wow. Yeah. Like a phoenix.

But yeah, I look at people and I see, and I also wonder who's coming through them in this particular moment to make them this way. What trauma is perpetuated in this? Yes. So how do people work with you? I love your book. I love the name of your book because I a hundred percent agree with it. There is magic in your genes. So most of my work has been done helping people who are searching. That is what I've adopted people. I get an email, Hey, so-and-so is looking for to find out more. I also have

started teaching a class. It's called Priestess of Sacred Roots. And it's a genealogy priestess. And it's taking people through the very basics of genealogy, traditional genealogy, genetic genealogy, and also the magical parts of it, how to keep a daily practice in conjunction with your genealogy and how to tie those two things together. Because a lot of people say they resonate with my book and that message can then be further spread by others who can also bring this kind of healing and balance and equanimity to the world through genealogy and everything that it offers through our history. And there's other parts of genealogy too. There's the family tree part with autosomal DNA, which is the DNA that you get from your mom and your dad

equally. But there's also Y-chromosomal DNA that men get from their direct father line. And there's mitochondrial DNA that people get from their mother line. Men and women get from their mother line. And there's power along those two. A lot of women find empowerment through working with mitochondrial DNA. A lot of men can find empowerment working with their paternal line. And then you can cross- section over and you can say this male energy that I get from my father was also influenced by his maternal lineage, what comes down those lines.

So there's different tracks you can take. So you can do autosomal DNA and do your tree. You can do work on your maternal lineage. You can work on your paternal lineage. You can work on your ex-inheritance, ex-DNA inheritance, which is really convoluted, but still a path, right? When I associate all of these things with different things, like your autosomal DNA, to me, because it's so patchwork with different bits of ancestry, especially for us here in the United States, I think of that little patchwork cloak, your ancestors wrap around

you, you know, your mitochondrial DNA, that's your literal source of power. That's the part of the cell that is the powerhouse at the bottom. And so I think of that your power, that's your crown, that's your crown of power that sits on your head. Your Y DNA is the staff that grounds you to the earth and is your strength and so in your energetic dna is your aura and x dna is like that is the chalice that you drink and what you drink and get sustenance and so all of these things come together and create these things for you that you can envision in your mind. Like you can picture a cloak around yourself. You can picture in your mind the cloak of what your cloak is going to look like. It's not going to be like anybody else's because there's only one you. And so you can envision this cloak as your shield, as your bubble, as your protection, as your warmth and your connection to people. So when you feel

like you are not in a sovereign moment or you've lost power in a situation, I tell people take a deep breath just for a moment. It doesn't have to be anything dramatic. It doesn't have to be anything. And think about the crown that sits on your head, your divinity, your legitimacy. And think about every woman who's come before you that has given birth to the daughter that leads to you. And how many thousands of generations that goes back. So you're the end of a very lengthy chain of women who have given birth, who have lived long enough to give birth to the next daughter. It's a miracle. And that's back 150 to 200,000 years to the original mother from Africa.

And so since that time, there has been an unbroken chain of women that have come before you. And that's powerful. It is. And so when I tell people when they are, like I said, when they're feeling less than sovereign or feeling less than legitimate, whatever, just take a breath just for a second. You just need to gain control in the situation. Close your eyes. All those women did not go through the pains of childbirth for you to sit on your ass and get treated like shit. That's what I tell people all the time.

I love it. Yeah. Own it. Own it. And the same thing for you. Even as a woman, we don't inherit YDNA from our father, but we're heavily influenced by his presence or its lack of presence in our life. That staff, or if you're having trouble feeling strong, if you don't feel grounded, close your eyes and envision that staff connecting you to the earth, holding you upright, and acting as support for you. Even if your father was not a supportive person in your life, the energy that comes down through that line absolutely is. And so these are ways that you can find balance in everyday situations that you can look to your heritage and remind yourself that

you are worthy of respect and to be treated appropriately and all the other things in life that we have to fight for sometimes sometimes Sometimes I think they're rolling in their graves, the shit I'm telling. Absolutely. Especially some of those women that went to great lengths to keep the shit hidden. Yes. Yeah. And I think,

I think about what in those situations, especially like in your situation, the pain and the shame that must have accompanied that. And also on the flip side, the hope and the dream. So here you are, you are a manifestation of somebody's dream. We can disagree on politics and religion and everything else. But at the end of the day, most people want for their children to be able to live life safely, warmly, fed, to be sovereign and to be able to pursue their dreams. And I think that's the common thread. And I remind myself of that when I get politically heated or whatever. And I'm like, I've met some people on the opposite side who I know also just want these things,

but the way we think it should be approached is different. But at the base of it all, we all want these things for our families, for the most part. Of course, like I said, there's always crappy people. But again, genealogy offers so much. It's your backstory and your backbone. Well, thank you so much, Carol, for coming on.

I love that you have been able to find the beauty in this for yourself, for your family, for your husbands. That's pretty amazing. And then to share it with everyone else, because that's truly what I think this work is. It's not just for you. It's not just for your lineage. It should expand from that. Everybody did this. It would actually help everybody in the collective. We're all connected. People tend to focus in on their tree. Their tree is in a forest. I love that. Yes, that's true. And all the roots are intertwined. Tell everybody where they can get your book.

So, okay. My book is called The Magic in Your Jeans and it's written as Carol Crow. It is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. You can get it, order it anywhere books are sold. The publisher is Wiser Books. And yeah, you can, I'm on social media. You can website is carol.com, C-A-I-R-E-L-E.com. Super excited to have you. We'll have to hook our family trees up and see where we hook yeah i'm sure there's connections thank you thank you thanks for listening to sense of soul podcast and thanks to our special guests for joining me

if you want more of sense of soul check out my website at www.mysenseofsoul.com where you can work with me one-on-one or help support Sense of Soul Podcast by donating to my coffee fund. Thanks for listening.