Noun

(en noun)

Ancestor.^(w)

*

*:His forefathers had been, as a rule, professional men—physicians and lawyers; his grandfather died under the walls of Chapultepec Castle while twisting a tourniquet for a cursing dragoon; an uncle remained indefinitely at Malvern Hill; an only brother at Montauk Point having sickened in the trenches before Santiago.

Cultural ancestor; one who originated an idea or tradition.

Noun

(en noun)

An ancestor.

* [1906] 2004, Memoirs of the Lord of Joinville, Ethel Wedgwood tr.

Sirs, I am quite sure that the King of England's forbears rightly and justly lost the conquered lands that I hold [...]

* [1936] 2004, Raymond William Firth, We the Tikopia [http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=Eiji-EnuhXUC&pg=PA345&lpg=PA345&sig=aB2VV0fcWv6lkQPQatQQbDhlm_8]

One does not take one’s family name therefrom, and again the position of the mother in that group is determined through her father and his male forbears in turn; this too is a patrilineal group.

* 1997, H. L. Hix, Understanding W. S. Merwin [http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=8JIveUt8StQC&pg=PA107&lpg=PA107&sig=_AETFoZUYlti38_Va0zOHD4yZTk]

Beginning with the bald declaration “I think I was cold in the womb,” the speaker in “The Forbears'” then decides that his brother (who died soon after birth) must also have been cold in the womb, like his grandfather John and the ' forbears who antedated John.

*{{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-14, author=(Jonathan Freedland)

, volume=189, issue=1, page=18, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Obama's once hip brand is now tainted , passage=Now we are liberal with our innermost secrets, spraying them into the public ether with a generosity our forebears could not have imagined. Where we once sent love letters in a sealed envelope, or stuck photographs of our children in a family album, now such private material is despatched to servers and clouds operated by people we don't know and will never meet.}}