ANCESTRAL • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Ancestral

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/ænsˈɛstrəl/ Listen

Ancestral

adjective

Inherited or inheritable by established rules (usually legal rules) of descent. Synonyms: hereditary, patrimonial, transmissible. "Ancestral lore" , "Hereditary monarchy" , "Patrimonial estate" , "Transmissible tradition"

Of or belonging to or inherited from an ancestor.

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Etymology of 'Ancestral'

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"Ancestral" Quotes from Famous Books

... a convention. Men and women are attached to it as they are attached to material things, as a king is attached to his crown or an old family to its ancestral home. We have all been led to believe that love is splendid and wonderful, and the greatest thing in the world, and it pains us to part with it. Faith, we will not part with it. The man who would bid us put it by is a knave and a fool, a vile, degraded wretch, who will receive pardon ...

— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... fantastic glee is so strangely blended with an indescribable master-note of sadness. The dance itself is nothing; it might as well be called a Rigadoon or a Sailor's Hornpipe, so far as the steps go. The tune is everything; it is amongst the immortals. Who composed it? Did it come from Normandy, the ancestral home of so many French Canadians and of French Canadian song? Or did some lonely but inspired voyageur, on the banks of Red River, sighing for Detroit or Trois Rivieres—for the joys and sorrows of home—give birth to its mingled chords in ...

— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... at least the family, worshipped in the form of Confucius; his precepts and admonitions, the sacred hiao or filial submission, the tablets and ancestral piety, were a part of her blood; as was the infinitely fainter infusion of Buddhism; yet in her intellectual brooding it was to the Tao-teh-king that she returned. She paused to recall that, the brace at last removed, she was practically completely recovered; but ...

— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer

... volume, the Ten Broeck Genealogical Record, are reproductions of some of the landscape views by Albertina Ten Broeck at the same date. They show the house and farm surroundings of the old Ten Broeck "Bouwerie," the ancestral home in New York, and give a wonderfully good idea of it. These are not in dead silhouette, for an appearance of shading is afforded by finely cut lines and intervening spaces. The highest form of cut-paper reproduction and decoration ...

— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle

... been surmised from what has gone before, that when Henry said to himself that he would go and see Aunt Tipping, he did not propose to himself a visit to the country seat of some quaint old lady of quality. Baronial towers and stately avenues of ancestral elm did not make a picturesque background for his thoughts as he ...

— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

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