noun
ancestry
AN-ses-tree/ˈænsestri/
Descent from earlier generations of a family.
The woman traces her ancestry through portraits of her mother and grandmother.
Etymology
The “forebear” base is extended from individual ancestors to their collective series. Ancestry therefore names the family line through which someone descends.
In context
trace her black ancestry back into the 1700s, something we can almost never do, and to reveal in the end the rarest of all finds in African-American genealogy, the document that freed her first ancestor.
More examples
- She has both Irish and Japanese ancestry.
- The gathering brings together families with different ancestries.
- They know little about their ancestry before the migration.
Forms
ancestry · ancestries