Part I of III
Can astrology be used for ancestor work?
Ancestor work has been my hobby for a long time now and I’ve recently been playing around with incorporating my astrological expertise into this practice. A huge hurdle that many of us experience is that we don’t have birth data for our ancestors. Fortunately, this is not difficult information to gather from census reports and related documents for ancestors born in the last 200 years or so. So it’s helpful to have at least made some initial forays on sites like ancestry.com and the free familysearch.org before looking for astrological patterns. You’re not going to find birth times on sites like that (or maybe anywhere except written into the family Bible) but that shouldn’t stop you from running birth charts for ancestors. I run noon charts when I don’t have a birth time because that puts us right in the middle of the Moon’s 13-degree daily transit, so you’ll never be more than about 7 degrees off from the actual Moon degree. We don’t have the benefit of using houses with this method, but you can still gather a lot of information from generational placements, repeating signs, and tight aspects.
So - what can you learn? I should preface this by saying that I think it’s important to gather as much information as you can about a specific ancestor before turning to astrology for guidance. As a general rule, I don’t feel comfortable reading for anyone without their express permission, and so dead people represent kind of a murky area for me. Every individual has the potential to make an ideal response to a birth chart or a regrettable one, and I don’t believe the chart alone can tell us which path they might have chosen. So looking at the chart of a deceased ancestor is, for me, just one component of the information gathering process.
I’ll use one of my ancestors as an example: my second great-grandfather, John Turner Finley (1850-1914). He was born in Tennessee, married and had a family in Memphis, and at some point moved his whole brood to Texas before settling in Atlanta. He and his wife Elizabeth Ament both died in 1914. He was employed as a brakeman on a train line and his last few jobs were listed as night watchman at the train depot. I was able to gather all that data without breaking a sweat from my computer in California.
Interestingly, the “bad guy” in my American Renaissance Tarot project features a locomotive as a symbol of reckless aggression.
As far as my personal feeling about him, and the family lore, that gets a lot more speculative. I have severed my ties with my own father because the abuse was so unforgivable, and furthermore he has remained unrepentant. John Turner Finley is my father’s great-grandfather in the direct paternal line. He died well before my father was born, and I never heard a story about him that I can recall. However, we lived in Tennessee for about four years when I was a child. My mother, whom I am still in communication with, claims never to have heard a whisper about the Finley family origins in Tennessee. She’s of the opinion that my father wasn’t aware he had ancestral ties there. My memories of being sexually abused by my father date to our time in that house in Tennessee.
So that’s one reason that John Turner Finley the Tennessean haunts my lineage. My father was a bad guy, and he claimed to be that way because of the abuse that his father heaped on him. I heard lots of stories about my father’s rough uncles and their regular stays at the county jail in Atlanta, but those folks belong to a different line of the family. So what about John Turner Finley, was he a rough customer too?
His father, Tillman Brittain Finley, was a slave-owner in Tennessee. That right there told me everything (I thought) I needed to know: slave-owning father, culture of normalized dehumanization, Southerner who came of age in the Reconstruction Era. Maybe John Turner Finley was bitter about the South’s defeat and even joined the KKK. I painted a man of pure evil in my mind.
But then I found something in the public record that shocked me. John Turner Finley ran away to join the Union army when he was about 14. That's right, I said the Union! I was so convinced that this data was incorrect that I spent hours researching it. It turns out that Tennessee was about split down the middle when it came to Southern loyalty in the Civil War. Well, this changed everything! John Turner Finley went from being evil in my mind to having his head screwed on straight. Also, (presumably) defying your father at 14 to go fight for the rival team represents one hell of a Saturn opposition! (The Saturn opposition at 14-15 is the aspect that lays the groundwork for the Saturn return that happens around age 29).
In my intuitive work around connecting to my paternal line, I had the sense that the “bad guy” portion of my father’s lineage was recent in derivation. A psychic I work with confirmed this. She volunteered images of the railroad and of HooDoo practice. I knew immediately she was talking about John Turner Finley - I imagined him beating up drunks with his nightstick, and experimenting with HooDoo during his 20-year career in Memphis. He followed the rails his whole life, and was likely frequently away from home, working the line and getting up to no good.
If you think my imagination is running wild, it’s only commensurate with the intensity of the violence I grew up with. Not only the sexual humiliation of myself and my mother, but also the everpresent physical violence and verbal abuse. It’s hard for me to conceive of my father having descended from innocuous Presbyterians. Also, to be abundantly clear, I have no moral judgment of HooDoo. It’s a vibrant syncretic American religion, though it is more morally flexible than conventional Christianity.
There’s something else odd here too - the last two houses I've lived at have been adjacent to train tracks. In Eugene, Oregon, we lived practically right on the rail-line that cuts through the middle of town, and were frequently awakened from deep sleep by the blaring of those godawful train horns. Our current home in Long Beach is positioned under an overhead rail-line. I could throw a rock from my front yard and hit the retaining wall that shields the view of the track from us. I really believe that the ancestors surround us and impact us whether we’re paying attention to them or not. John Turner Finley’s early job as a brakeman was incredibly dangerous work, running from car to car to manually slow the train. He was certainly scrappy, perhaps a real roughneck. I like to think that he guided my choice to domicile near train tracks, in order to communicate something of his life to me.
In 2022 I traveled to Atlanta for the purpose of leaving offerings at the graves on my father’s side of the family. This is a practice I’ve undertaken as a way of making a physical link to the past. I use it to tap into the scene of an ancestor’s final resting place and get a read on whether they have crossed over to the next place, or are still earthbound and wandering. When I got to the graveyard where John Turner Finley was buried, my intuition was that he didn’t want to be found. I didn’t feel invited to stay a spell, as I so often do by more benevolent and loving ancestors. I left my offering of flowers and a mojo bag I had created for his healing at the gravesite, turned around, and didn’t look back. The cemetery was creepy quiet on this blazing Juneteenth weekend in Georgia. I had been taking cabs everywhere because of a snafu with my rental car reservation, and the humidity made me feel like I was floating as I proceeded slowly to the cemetery gates. I passed through them, looked down, and saw the corpse of a headless owl.
I got that feeling that you get when you know you have stepped into a bit of witchcraft. I looked away quickly and continued walking to the main road. Remember how the psychic correlated John Turner Finley with HooDoo? When you’re doing ancestor work, the synchronicities come thick and fast. I’ve visited a lot of graveyards in my day, and I’ve never seen anything like that before. I took it as a message to tread lightly and consider leaving John Turner Finley alone for a while. (There’s no HooDoo practice I’m aware of that involves owls. However, owls are symbolic of magic in parts of Africa, and their body parts have been used to work malevolent magic).
As I write this, I realize that most people aren’t going to nerd out over genealogical research and undertake extensive psychic work and make pilgrimages to family grave sites. For me, the motivation comes through wanting to be a force for bringing healing to my family line. A therapist I worked with once described me as very generous, always imagining loopholes of redemption for toxic family members. On another of these cemetery pilgrimages to the South, my husband’s mentor commented that I’m still chasing the dream of saving my father’s soul. I suppose a part of that’s true, but I would call it self-interest: cleaning up the ancestral line facilitates healing and connection for myself and my descendants. Also, at the time that I made this first pilgrimage to Atlanta, my progressed Moon was moving through Virgo in the 4th house, a position which translates roughly to “family clean-up.”
With all that said - let’s look at the chart! The first thing I notice is the Sun conjunct Mars in Scorpio. Doesn’t seem too unusual, does it? Yet I learned recently that Mars only winds up conjuncting the Sun in this sign about every 16 years, occasionally skipping a cycle and not joining the Sun in Scorpio again for another 32 years. The placement also caught my attention because both my maternal grandmother and my maternal great-grandmother have the Sun conjunct Mars in Scorpio. My maternal great-great-grandmother has the Sun conjunct Mars in Aries, a Mars-ruled sign like Scorpio.
So even though John Turner Finley is my direct paternal ancestor, his chart has a kind of resonance with my immediate maternal line. Isn’t astro-ancestor work cool? I’ll do some interpretation here while being careful not to send every Mars conjunct the Sun in Scorpio person straight to hell. Abstractly considered, Mars conjunct the Sun in any sign is intense. There’s a volatility, a quick processing speed, and even hyper-vigilance. It’s best if these folks have a physical outlet for their relentless need to spar and compete. I once had a Mars conjunct the Sun client tell me that she regularly did sit-ups next to the family dinner table while everyone else was eating. When we drop this fiery combo into the already intense sign of Scorpio, the possibilities turn darker. Mars in Scorpio has a reputation for inflicting suffering. Canny Scorpio is often consumed with power drives and is alert to the weaknesses of its opponents. Unhealed Scorpios can be manipulative and double-dealing, and Mars conjunct the Sun here is like walking around with an unsheathed weapon and a jerky trigger finger.
Hear me out - I doun’t doubt that there are lovely and grounded folks walking this earth who have Mars conjunct the Sun in Scorpio. I met one of them in my astrology classes earlier this year and she was wonderful. But the potential to fall headlong into identification with the shadow is high with this placement. If you’re not doing inner work, you’re probably making everyone else around you miserable, or alternately engaging in some self-punishing behavior. My Sun conjunct Mars in Scorpio grandmother, for example, was a nasty person. The level of vitriol she could generate on a dime was truly terrifying. I recently asked my healer friend to help me with some ancestor work on that lineage, and she said her guides had taken to calling my grandmother “that awful woman.” That didn’t surprise me. My grandmother’s energy reminds me of the possessive mother in the film Like Water for Chocolate, who ruthlessly controls her daughter’s life and prevents her from being happy, even haunting her from beyond the grave.
OK, so my thesis is that John Turner Finley gave himself over to the dark side, and my evidence for this is, among other things, the lineage of bad fathers on that side of the family. I see the Sun conjunct Mars in Scorpio, and that gives me a sense of confirmation. Yeah, it would have been easy for him to identify with the shadow - perhaps as an alcoholic who caused harm to those around him, perhaps as an abuser and defiler of women, perhaps as an irresponsible gambler or con artist. Perhaps he was even a pedophile like my father and his father.
“John Finley” is a pretty common name. I searched Memphis newspapers in the last two decades of the 19th century, and I found the John Finley who was arrested in connection with a riverboat scheme, in which he operated a two-room raft for working the logging camps, with prostitutes set up in one room and card-playing in the other. The courtroom testimony was so coarse and vile that it provoked an emotion of disgust in the audience. Part of me loves this little slice of Americana and its “Huck Finn” aura of catch-as-catch-can con-men on the Mississippi. But I can’t say for sure that this John Finley was my ancestor. Another newspapers.com hit featured a John Finley in Memphis who was so drunk that he fell out of a 2nd-story window in a rooming house.
Now let’s look at the Moon. Moon in Sagittarius is imbued with the spirit of adventure. I’m fond of describing it as the “get out of Dodge” Moon. Your mission is to get as far away from the place of your birth as you possibly can. I’d say running off to join the Union army when your father was a slave-owner qualifies as a real Sag move. John Turner Finley also abandoned the family homestead in Tennessee for urban life and eventually settled in another state. He rode the rails as a trainman, embodying another Sag archetype, the one I nickname “gotta go!” Venus also being in Sagittarius adds romantic adventurousness to the mix. With both relational planets, the Moon and Venus, being in Sagittarius, it’s likely that John Turner Finley was a classic Sag Don Juan, or that he viewed women as potential conquests. From what I can tell he was married at least a few times before settling down with Elizabeth Ament, and doesn’t appear to have bothered with the formality of divorce.
Most astrologers will have noticed by now the startling conjunction of Pluto and Uranus in John Turner Finley’s chart. This is a generational event and quite rare, happening on average only about once every 125 years. As far as how revolutionary this aspect is, I’ll comment that the Pluto-Uranus conjunction of the 1850s seems to have led directly to the new spirit of abolitionism in the United States whose outcome was the Civil War. The last Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s not only brought us Civil Rights, but a sexual and cultural revolution as well.
In John Turner Finley’s natal chart, this iconic conjunction in Aries, with Saturn in Aries trailing behind it, strikes me as potentially nihilistic. My great-great-grandfather lived through a crisis in old time religion, when the rise of science, and particularly Darwin’s landmark publication on human evolution, poked holes in the Christian mythology. The Civil War unfolded in its entirety before his 15th birthday, and he saw the fortunes of his father’s culture crash down around him. What’s coming through to me is the kill-or-be-killed, survival of the fittest spirit of that Aries conjunction, with Pluto especially prone to showing us the shadow side of any sign. If nothing means anything anymore, and the old gods are falling, living through aggression and sheer will can appear justified.
In any case, it’s certainly a Marsy chart, not one given to much reflection or soul searching. The combination of Mars on the Sun in a Mars-ruled sign, the freewheeling Moon and Venus in Sagittarius, and the dramatic conjunction of the generational planets, Pluto and Uranus, in martial Aries, together paint a very clear picture. In addition, John Turner Finley was born during the New Moon phase, with the Moon about one whole sign ahead of the Sun, a placement known for “youthful” karma, or a penchant for risking big and needing to learn things the hard way. New Moon people are also characterized by self-absorption, a preoccupation with their own inner vision. I call it the “rockstar” placement because they tend to be heavy on the charisma too.
John Turner Finley’s chart doesn’t look anything like mine - I’m lacking significant placements in Scorpio, Sag, and Aries. Neither does the chart of his son or the grandson to whom I’m directly related resemble his firecracker of a chart in any meaningful way. However, my father, John Turner Finley’s great-grandson, is an Aries with a Sagittarius Moon. Astrologically, we can call that a match, or some evidence of a pattern repeating across the generations. In a follow-up blog, I’ll trace the little strand of astro DNA that we do share through the four charts of my direct paternal line to my own. In every one of those charts, there is a sensitive point around the same degree of Leo.
I did leave John Turner Finley’s spirit alone for a while, but about eight months later or so, he dialed me up on the psychic telephone. It’s a difficult thing to explain unless it’s happened to you, but I had the sense that the goodwill and intention I’d put into the mojo bag I’d left at his grave had done its work. I was ready to engage with him without judgment, resentment, or preconceived ideas. The fact that any crimes he’d committed had happened over a hundred years ago certainly helped me move past my negative associations. I really believe that the dead can continue to heal in the next place (this has been a common theme of the ancestral teachings I’ve received), and I think this was an attractive proposition to him.
The Tarot card I drew in association with John Turner Finley is a scorcher! I frequently work with Tarot to confirm the identity of a spirit visitor. This striking King of Wands from the Pulp Tarot, with its faceless man who looks ready to kick some ass and take some names, really conjured up the spirit of my Marsy ancestor. The Wands suit is about the assertion of personal will and power. When I pulled it I had the feeling that my astrological reconstruction of John Turner Finley allowed him to stand in his most positive potential, while my ancestral healing practice opened up the door for his redemption.
John Turner Finley now acts as a kind of ancestral guardian for my spirit work. His energy is fierce, and fiercely loyal. I mentioned that we live adjacent to some railroad tracks - a large transient population is frequently camped up there, and occasionally we have issues with noise, fires, vandalism, theft, and any number of things you can imagine with an off-grid population. I stationed JT up there, imagining him in his old role of night watchman at the railyard. We haven’t had any problems with our unhoused neighbors since.
We live nearby Knott’s Berry Farm in Orange County and have had season passes off and on for years. Recently, Knott’s celebrated 50 years of “Knott’s Scary Farm” (a Halloween-themed fright fest), and sold a figurine that looked a lot like a 19th century signalman for the railroad (another one of John Turner Finley’s jobs), with a signal lamp that turns on and off. My husband gave me a look and said, “you have to get this.” I don’t have any photographs of my paternal great-great-grandfather, and so now this zombie signalman represents John Turner Finley on my altar.
Am I just living in fantasy land? Could be. I always have to keep that possibility open to reassure myself that I’m not completely crazy. But I am also working with the objective knowledge that John Turner Finley was my great-great-grandfather, and, in my professional opinion, he had a pistol of a natal chart. Identifying powerful ancestors and working with them as lineage archetypes provides me with a sense of family connection that I never felt with my own family growing up. As a wise elder once said to me, the most degraded or reviled ancestors have the potential to become the most powerful allies, and this certainly seems to be the case with John Turner Finley. In follow-up blogs, I’ll look at what we can learn about ancestral inheritance from chart comparison and synastry.