Boris Barvinok (the boy in the foreground) with three generations of his ancestors.

An ancestor is a person (or another organism or thing) from whom (or which) another is descended. Usually, it refers to a person far in the past, rather than the parents or grandparents in the close family. A very similar word is forebear. A female ancestor may be called an ancestress. The line of ancestors from which an organism descends is referred to as its ancestry.