You may be the one who always brings the family together, even though nobody ever officially appointed you to the post. You are the one they call when two people aren’t speaking, you remember the birthdays, you organise the family dinner and somehow, quite naturally, you know who had better not sit next to whom. Then one day you hear a story about your grandmother and realise that fifty years ago she was doing almost exactly the same.
For you it may be money. You have a job, you earn well, the bills are paid, yet before any bigger purchase an emergency meeting is called in your head. Do you need it, is it worth it, what if the money is needed for something else? Then you learn that your grandfather lost everything, and after him the family lived for decades with the idea that security always matters more than desire.
It may be a talent you take for the most ordinary quality. You know how to sell, cook, write, work with your hands, read people, make a place feel cosy, come up with solutions or start over while others are still discussing how dreadful things are. To you it is simply part of your character, until someone says: “Your grandfather was just the same” or “That’s exactly how your grandmother did it.”
Or there may be a family story that has always drawn you. You know the beginning, you know the end, and in the middle there is a suspiciously large gap. Someone left. Someone gave something up. Someone loved a person who was hardly ever mentioned afterwards. Someone started life over, and the family version has stayed a short “that’s how it turned out”. If you ask a little more, everyone suddenly starts discussing the weather, which is usually a good sign that the story has a few more pages.
From our family we receive far more than a resemblance in the eyes, the nose or the way we walk. Abilities can continue with us, and so can family rules, attitudes to love and money, ideas of success, unfinished dreams, fears, ways of coping and decisions that once helped another person live their life. We receive the good things too — resilience, talent, curiosity, enterprise, the ability to love, to make a home, to bring people together and to find a way out when things look hopeless.
The most interesting are the things we received so early that we don’t see them as an inheritance at all. We say “that’s just who I am”, “it’s always like that with me”, “I simply can’t do it any other way” and carry on. Yet behind a sentence like that there may be a whole family thread that began long before us.
This test is for you if you have ever wondered why a certain theme keeps coming back in your family, why you react so strongly to something another person would call a trifle, where an ability comes from that nobody ever taught you to use, or why an old family story still stirs you. It can give you another view of what you carry — whether what you feel most strongly is a gift, a lesson, a promise or an untold story, and how that inheritance connects with your life now.
And the most interesting question comes a little after that: what do you do with what you have received? Because an ability can be developed, an old lesson can be understood in a new way, a family thread can continue differently, and a half-told story can finally find its place in the bigger picture.
Look at the four images and choose the one your eyes keep returning to. Don’t analyse it for long and don’t look for the prettiest — this is a test about your lineage, after all; the contest for best family photo we’ll leave for another day. Remember the number of the image that draws you first and read your result. You may recognise something that has been with you all your life, and that you simply never looked at as part of your family’s story.
If you chose the old chest, there is probably something in your family history that draws you, even if you don’t know exactly why. It may be a person you have only heard a few sentences about, an old photograph you always look at a little longer, a sudden departure, a separation, a great love, a loss, a family quarrel, an inheritance turned down or a decision that changed the lives of several people after it. Supposedly everyone knows the story, but when you ask for details it turns out that the beginning is one sentence, the end is two, and the middle has vanished somewhere between the generations.
The rest of this article is for subscribers.
Open to everyone on .
If you chose the candle in the window, your family inheritance is tied to a lesson that someone before you learned from their own life and then passed on. You may not know at all which story it began with, but you probably know the sentence it left behind. “Don’t count on anyone.” “There should always be money put aside.” “You don’t leave a secure job.” “For the family, you do everything.” “Don’t show how hard it is for you.” “Think of others first.” Rules like these can be passed on so naturally that after two or three generations nobody asks any more who said them first. They are simply part of the family order, almost like the recipe for the Sunday pie, except that they affect far more decisions.
The rest of this article is for subscribers.
Open to everyone on .
If you chose the family house with the apple tree, your family thread is tied to what deserves to continue. It may be a real place — a house, land, a yard, a town or a village you feel especially close to, even if you haven’t lived there for a long time. It may be a family profession, a tradition, a dream, an attitude to work, a love of learning, a way of gathering people or that special feeling of home someone before you knew how to create.
The rest of this article is for subscribers.
Open to everyone on .
If you chose the hands, your inheritance is tied to an ability. And there is a good chance that for a long time you didn’t consider it a gift, because it comes naturally to you. That is the trick with natural abilities — we live with them so long that we start assuming everyone else received the same set.
The rest of this article is for subscribers.
Open to everyone on .
The rest of this article is for subscribers.
Open to everyone on .