Why I Do This Work? ...
To honor the resilience of those who came before me.
In 1849, my great-great-grandfather Patrick Sinnott arrived at the Port of New York on the famine ship Erin go Bragh. He was on the list of Famine Immigrants.
I didn’t know that story for most of my life. I didn’t know my paternal grandmother had been placed in an orphanage at two years old after her father died in a New York City tenement, that she and her four sisters were separated, that she was there for twelve years. No one in the family had ever told us.
What I did know was the voice of scarcity and loss. The patterns that repeated in every generation because they were just how things were. There was so much loss.
When I lost my husband to alcoholism, grief opened a door I didn’t know was there. What began as a need to understand my own story, what I was carrying and where it came from, became a calling that has spanned more than twenty years of researching the stories of immigrants and the ancestors who came before them. And somewhere in that work, the two halves of my life came together: the years I spent working with children from families shaped by addiction, abuse, and loss, and my own journey through grief into the silenced stories of my Irish-American lineage. I saw the patterns that had been passed down. And more importantly, I saw the resilience.
That is how I became a trauma-informed genealogist.
Today I am the co-founder of the Ancestral Healing Center, alongside Ruschelle Khanna, LCSW and Michael H. Hallett. We are building the field of trauma-informed genealogy, helping individuals and families trace inherited patterns of trauma and resilience to their ancestral source and distinguish between pain that belongs to their own experience and pain they inherited.
Many of the stories I uncover are immigrant stories. Almost all of us are immigrants and many of those whose ancestry was born of this land have immigrant stories mixed in. The when and how we got here is the stories of resilience. How and why we made the crossing. Why the name that was changed. When the language that was lost. And things never spoken about never shared because survival meant moving forward not looking back. These stories don’t disappear. They live in the bodies and behaviors of the people who come after. And they can be found, understood, and healed.
I am the author of Ancestral Whispers. I hold a BA in Psychology, am a Certified Grief and Trauma Specialist, and a certified End-of-Life Doula. I am a featured speaker at the LA Tribune Voices of Impact Summit, the Global Women’s Journal Leadership Summit, and IANDS 2024 and 2025.
If you’re working in intergenerational healing, immigrant story preservation, genealogy, elder care, or legacy building, I’d love to connect.
www.ancestralhealingcenter.com, www.tellmeourstory.com
Ruschelle Khanna, LCSW , Michael H Hallett Ancestral Healing Center Cafe Chats Recap