WHAT'S HIDDEN IN YOUR family tree?

It's not just our hair and eye colour that we inherit from our ancestors, but also their stress responses, discovers Sally Saunders

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A few days ago I was going through some drawers to declutter, and found one of my most treasured possessions. It is a letter from 1907, written to my great grandmother, Harriet. Before she married, Harriet had been in service with a local upper-class family, and it was a note from one of the young ladies she served.

In beautiful handwriting, Miss Emmie, as my great grandmother knew her, sends Harriet her condolences on the death of her father, and of her child. Both had died in the few months since the pair last saw each other, and Harriet was to lose another child before my grandmother was born a couple of years later (who was named Gladys Emily, after her ladyship).

It's all ancient history, of course, and well over a century later it is little more than an artefact from another age... or is it? Could the events detailed in this letter leave their imprint on me and my family today? Psychologist Dr Rathika Marsh says it's possible. ‘If you’re thinking about stress and trauma, there’s often an ancestral pattern that comes into how somebody is,’ she says. ‘So for me, for example, my parents were born in Sri Lanka, and there was a certain way of doing things. They had to leave the country because of lack of education opportunities and they were immigrants at a very young age, in their early 20s.

‘And so they came carrying all of this pressure, stress of “I have to survive”, and so in my life, that was really projected onto me. And whatever you see of your parents in terms of how they’re responding to stress, anxiety, in terms of how their mental health is, you absorb.’