A Shelf for the Dead: An Ancestor Altar Story

An Altar Full of Strangers I Never Met

There's typically a shelf in my house dedicated entirely to people who died before I was born, and I talk to them more often than you'd think.

It's my ancestor altar — one small piece of ancestral veneration, which is really just a fancy way of saying I keep the people who came before me close, even the ones I never got to meet.

As an eclectic witch, I love to read about practices from various faiths and traditions. The ones that grab my attention and make me curious get a deep dive with research through books, podcast, and google searching. But I do not get to incorperate every ritual I want into my own tradition - cultural appropriation is something I'm almost hyper-aware of.

There are absolutely practices out there I'd love to fold into my everyday — but it wouldn't be appropriate, because I haven't put in the dedication to become an initiate, I'm not part of that lineage, and I'm not part of that community. It's a hard thing, looking at yourself and saying no to a want. But it's about respect, plain and simple. You don't bring your friend's grandma's bread pudding to the potluck and call it your own family recipe — that's just rude.

So this piece isn't a how-to on any specific closed tradition. This is me, talking about my altar — my people, my objects, my rhythm — laid out honestly, in the hope that it nudges you toward building your own ancestral veneration practice.

Who Actually Belongs on the Altar

I never met my blood grandparents face-to-face. Both had passed before I was born. What I have instead are photographs, and stories, and — over time — the particular characteristics I've come to ask for or think of when I think of them. I know more about the grandmothers than the grandfathers on both sides, so we'll start with the ladies I technically met in the womb, and nowhere else.

My maternal grandmother, Ida Mae, was the first to go. She died when my mother was in her early teens — the family was hit head-on by a drunk driver in the mountains of West Virginia. Most cars back then only came with limited seatbelt up front, so she'd buckled it around the kids and left herself without one. Because of that, she was the only one who didn't survive the collision. That accident sent shockwaves through the whole family, shaping the lives of her children in ways that carried forward for decades.

There's more to her than the accident, though. Come to find out, Ida Mae had a first husband before my grandfather, with a handful of kids from that first marriage. They lived on the other side of the mountain, and I've always liked to think that's part of why she stayed so rooted to that land — close enough to keep an eye on both families at once. I call her Mountain Mama when she shows up in meditations. When I ask for her presence, it's usually for maternal wisdom — the kind that keeps things simple at the center, even when the rest of it is complicated. I have a black-and-white photo of her and my grandfather with the car she died in, sitting on the altar.

My paternal grandmother, Rita, was from New Jersey but used to sneak into New York City on the weekends to be a Rockette. She married my grandfather young — he was much older, and he'd had a first wife and kids of his own who are rarely mentioned. Rita was the last of the four grandparents to pass, so I've got more of her physical world: a teacup, a plate, a photo of her strutting down a New York sidewalk in an outfit straight out of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, mink draped over her shoulders. She's quieter on the altar than Mountain Mama — her last years were full of sickness and some real bitterness, so she doesn't show up often.

The altar doesn't stop at blood, though. It also holds my husband's family — a train conductor somewhere back in the line, so there are pocket watches and portraits representing that side, along with a set of cross-stitches his grandmother Louise made herself. And it holds people who aren't related to either of us by blood at all. When my mother went back to work, she hired a friend's mother to help raise me — and that woman and her husband (Mary and Joseph if you can beleive it) became family in every way that counts. I have photographs, wood carvings from Grandpa Joe, and the knife I learned to cut my food with as a kid, which was still sitting in Grandma Mary's kitchen drawer with my name on it when she passed. I was in my thirties by then.

Then there's my Uncle Phil — no kids, a string of ex-wives, and nobody who wanted his ashes when he died. So I took them. He was a lifelong smoker, so his ashes live in an old tobacco tin, parked in what I've started calling the grumpy old men corner with Grandpa Joe. Our dog's ashes ended up there too — turns out grumpy old men all like dogs, and they were all good with money, so that's the corner I go to when I need a little help stretching a budget.

My husband's grandmother, Louise (we called her Mommom), was close to us — I was in the room when she passed, and that's something that will always stay with me. I keep several photos of her on the altar, along with her corsage from our wedding, which I made out of fabric flowers because her asthma was too severe for real flowers. Her husband, Poppop Sam, ran a button factory that specialized in mother-of-pearl — so the altar's got bowls, dishes, and inlaid boxes from that side of the family, along with a stash of loose buttons I keep specifically for spellwork. All mother-of-pearl.

What They Left Behind

Photos are the baseline for me, especially for the ancestors I never met in person — they're the thing that makes an abstract relative into a real face. But objects are where the altar really comes alive, and I've learned that different objects earn different jobs.

Some are pure utility: Poppop Sam's marbles for lost-object spells, the buttons from the factory for general spellwork. There's a hand-carved wooden chain from Mountain Mama's side of the family that I oil at every solstice and equinox — and if you've never sat with the thought of how long it takes to hand-carve an actual chain out of a single piece of wood, link by link, without breaking a single one, take a second right now. The patience required is genuinely unsettling - and I need all the patience I can get with two kids.

I have my fraternal great grand father's gun permit — a necessity of the job, since he made his living as a carriage driver — which I use now in protection magic, along with a pair of his glasses that I turn to in spellwork when I need to see the path forward more clearly.

Some objects are pure personality, no utility required: Rita's teacup, her mink-and-sidewalk photo, the pocket watches from the conductor's line. They don't do anything. They just remind me who's there.

And then there's the mirror. It's Poppop Sam's from his time in the miltary, I think of it as my check. It's not there out of pride or because we've inherited something grand. It's there so that when I work with any of them, I catch my own reflection in the middle of it — a chance to ask myself honestly whether I've got balance between practice and the rest of my life, to question my choices, and to brace for change.

I can take their advice. I can learn from what they did right and what they didn't. I can ask for help. But at the end of it, every decision is still mine to make. I can see them in me — I just don't let that replace me.

How You Actually Tend It

The altar isn't a static display. It's a relationship, and relationships need upkeep.

I stand at this altar — I don't sit. Offerings are personal, not generic. Cigarettes for some, perfume or incense for others, always matched to who they actually were in life. I lean on seasonal, found offerings too — feathers I come across, acorns from a nice day at the park, leaves that stood out to us on the way to school, seeds left over from planting, flowers grown in the garden, whatever the time of year happens to hand me.

I also keep small cups of water out. Water shows up across a lot of ancestor traditions as a way of inviting that connection forward. I've read that some traditions — the Afro-Caribbean bóveda practice, specifically — call for water in odd numbers, tied to a number with real significance in that lineage. I'm not part of that tradition, so I don't borrow the specific count. I just keep it odd, because it felt right to hold onto that one small piece of the idea without claiming the rest of it.

My main way of actually communicating with them is through a bones-and-charms set and meditation, sometimes with a ritual oil to help me settle into that headspace. I also keep bells on the altar that serve double duty: dusting everything down and ringing them shakes loose any stagnant energy that's settled in, but I also think of it as waking the ancestors up when I come to work with them. I clean the altar regularly, on the solstices and equinoxes — except the winter solstice, which I usually celebrate a little later, sometime in the week between Christmas and New Year, once the holiday chaos has actually died down.

One boundary I hold firmly: I don't leave alcohol as an offering. It's been a real problem in parts of my family, and I'd rather not put more of it in the room, even symbolically.

A few last residents worth mentioning: a little cordial glass of crystals and shells that has a woman as the stem - my mother is rumored to have borrowed from a hotel (we don't examine that one too closely), a handful of poppets standing in for old friends who've passed, and a single stone for a cat who took a piece of me with him when he went.

The Real Work Is in the Remembering

None of this is a formula. It's not a checklist, and it's definitely not the only right way to keep an ancestor altar — it's just mine, built one object and one story at a time, mostly by accident, over a lot of years.

If you're starting your own, you don't need a mother-of-pearl button collection or a jar of marbles that used to belong to someone else. You need a photo, or a name, or a recipe you still make the way they made it. Start there. Let it grow the way mine did — a little messy, a little inherited, a little yours.

If you're adopted, or otherwise don't have access to your birth lineage, that doesn't lock you out of this either. If you feel comfortable with it, a DNA test can be a starting point (one that won't sell your information). It can point you toward the region of the world your ancestors likely came from, which gives you somewhere to start researching the traditions of that region. From there, your altar might begin with something as simple as a printed vintage map of that area, a piece of decor in a style native to that region (thrift stores are shockingly good for this), or a symbol connected to that place. It's a different starting point than a family photo, but it's every bit as real.

Where ever your starting point is, I'm excited to hear who's ready to come sit on your shelf.