ancestor

Thesaurus: synonyms, antonyms, and examples

your ancestors
ancestorI discovered that one of my ancestors was a member of King Henry VIII's court.
forebearMy forebears were enslaved and brought to this country.
forefatherI visited the land of my forefathers.
ancestryDNA tests tell me that I have Central Asian ancestry.
extractionMy family is of Italian extraction.
family treeSince many families will be gathering for the holiday, it's a perfect time to create a family tree.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Family: ancestors & descendants
ancestor
ancestral
ancestry
be in the/someone's bloodidiom
blood is thicker than wateridiom
descent
distaff
family tree
forbear
forefather
genealogy
generation
generationally
heraldic
heraldically
heraldry
progenitor
run in the familyidiom
sandwich generation
successor

Examples from literature

It is, indeed, rare in these days to find gentlemen as familiar as were their forebears with Latin and Greek. 
She knew little about her forebears on her father's side, except that they were English, whereas Paolo had centuries behind him crammed full of glorious ancestors whose deeds were celebrated on tapestries of great beauty and value. 
The robust blood of her French Canadian forebears was quickening to the call of the trail. 
The sudden emotions of his Gallic forebears swept through him. 
Think back a moment to my father and mother, and to my forebears farther back yet. 

forebear | American Dictionary

forebear
noun[ Cusually pl ]
(alsoforbear)us/ˈfɔr·beər, ˈfoʊr-/
an ancestor

Examples of forebear

forebear
How the world has changed: occasionally we rediscover long-forgotten truths that our forebears knew well.
Protecting the reputations of their forebears, they preferred to blame vengeful authorities rather than accept the treason of their fathers' friends and associates.
It had two main goals : to inscribe the brotherhood's marks on the land of the founder's forebears and to ensure the perpetuation of its legacy.
Future generations, moreover, could use the myth to claim the moral and intellectual high ground over presumably naive forebears.
We may be thankful that our linguistic forebears reduced this to a familiar monosyllable.
These examples remind us to forebear from generalizations until a more complete overview of topographical variations is achieved.
It opened up for them resources of power and riches that were unavailable to their stateless forebears.
Consequently, we would expect to find left-cerebral control of vocalization, but not right-handedness, in the earlier hominids or their primate forebears.
Surely the work of our forebears is more valuable to us than old wine.
These bridge the gap between the mistakes and discoveries of our forebears, and our own daily lives and surrounds.
For many centuries our forebears were free to abandon their children, although child abandonment elicits strict legal punishment today.
The diet of our forebears is always a matter of general interest, but to the nutritionist it is of more practical interest.
They differed from their putative forebears by approaching psychiatric treatment within the framework of an autonomous mind.
Simultaneously, generational differences between noble fathers and sons led the latter to create an individual style very different from that of their forebears.
Put simply, at a broad level our expectations are different from those of our forebears.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.