CHILDREN ARE NOT BORN with inherited memories, obtained from their parents or from anyone else, living or dead. Children are born with no particular identity until after having survived a few years, when they begin to remember a past and also remember who they were in relationship to all that happened in their past.
People are who they were. That is, they wouldn’t know themselves without the chance to find out, by living.
And yet it seems we were who we are, even though it couldn’t have been known at the time, when we could have been someone else.
Thwarticus 