Readers View 

Crossing the Centuries
Brenda Hammon
Spotlight Publishing House (2024) ISBN: 978-1962570800
Reviewed by Diana Coyle for Reader Views (08/2024) 5*- Fresh and Unique Approach to Geneology
 
Wanting to understand more about her ancestral tree, writing a memoir seemed the ideal thing to do in “Crossing the Centuries: Connecting to 165 Spirits and Energies of My Ancestral Tree” by Brenda Hammon. Throughout her life, Ms. Hammon never felt loved and cherished by her living relatives. Experiencing a traumatic event that changed her life forever, she decided that in order to understand herself better, she needed to understand her deceased ancestors better. They would teach her things that would assist her in learning more about herself and her living relatives. She came up with the idea of writing a memoir, basing it on the extensive research she planned to do to get to know her deceased relatives.
 
The author knew she had a huge task ahead of her and hoped that she would be able to obtain a sufficient amount of information so that she could walk away feeling she had a better understanding of herself and her relatives. Although she planned on doing extensive traditional genealogy research, Hammon decided she would utilize her unique abilities as an intuitive and psychic medium to see what information she would come up with.
 
When she opened the psychic channel to her deceased relatives, she wasn’t prepared for the roller coaster ride they were going to take her on. One hundred and sixty-five relatives stepped forward to tell her their stories. This book came into existence because of those relatives stepping forward.
This reviewer really enjoyed this fresh and extremely unique approach to how Ms. Hammon conducted her genealogy research on her family. I can’t ever recall reading another book written with this different approach, using her psychic and intuitive gifts to get genealogy results, as she has done. In using her intuitive gifts, this book immediately topped the charts in how to research an ancestral tree.
 
Turning the pages and seeing just how much information her deceased relatives were willing to share with her made this a truly endearing read. Hammon came from a very bad childhood trauma that she carried throughout her adult life. This trauma, and her writing about it in another book, caused many rifts with her living relatives. All these severed family connections made her feel lonely and unloved.
 
As she began having deceased relatives show themselves to her, sometimes at the most inopportune times I might add, gave her reassurance that there really were relatives that cared for her, even though they were no longer living. She set out with an open mind at how many relatives would come forward to tell their stories to her, and she was overwhelmed to be visited by one hundred and sixty-five energies and spirits. So many deceased relatives taking an interest in her personally proved to her that she wasn’t alone in the world as she felt all those decades earlier.
Hammon presented her research results in a fun way by documenting every person’s story as they told it to her. Reading this book made me feel as if these deceased people were sitting in front of me, telling their stories directly to me. It was amazing to learn of their trials and tribulations, no matter what time they lived in. Their accounts were detailed to the point of being completely believable. Their discussions with her ranged from their travels across the United States; fighting wars; loving and dying regarding both their relatives and themselves; in addition to the hardships and triumphs they faced within their time period. Reading their rich histories told in first person conversations was purely fascinating and thoroughly entertaining.
 
What I found remarkable was that the author gave full credit to those one hundred and sixty-five deceased relatives, expressing that without every one of them coming forward to tell her their stories, this book would never have come to fruition. Talk about food for thought in that statement. Not many authors can say their deceased relatives helped them pen their memoirs.
Overall, this reviewer truly enjoyed reading “Crossing the Centuries: Connecting to 165 Spirits and Energies of My Ancestral Tree” by Brenda Hammon. If you’re looking for a unique approach to reading an ancestral-based nonfiction book, look no further. Well done, Ms. Hammon!