Ancestry means the line of family members who came before you: your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on, stretching back through generations. Your ancestry is your family history, the chain of people whose lives led to yours.

When someone traces their ancestry, they're investigating where their family came from. They might discover that their great-great-grandmother immigrated from Ireland, or that their ancestors lived in Japan for centuries, or that their family included farmers, soldiers, teachers, and craftspeople. Some people use old documents, family stories, or even DNA tests to learn about their ancestry.

Your ancestors might have lived in completely different countries, spoken different languages, or faced challenges you can't imagine. Some families keep careful records of their ancestry and pass down stories about ancestors who did remarkable things. Other families have lost track of their history, maybe because records were destroyed or because their ancestors weren't allowed to keep records.

Understanding your ancestry can help you feel connected to the past and appreciate the long story that led to you. Every person alive today has ancestry that goes back thousands of generations, connecting all of us to the earliest humans who ever lived.