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Ilene Philipson’s thoughtful essay has inspired this response, both a memory piece and my version of a tribute to Masud Khan and to my collaboration with Linda Hopkins editing and publishing Khan’s diaries, or Work Books, as he called them. Through these tributes, I am put in touch with my longing to know my professional ancestors just as I long to know family members I never met. I find that when we come to know our ancestral figures as real-enough objects displaying all the messy frailties we humans are susceptible to, there is an opportunity to learn even more from them, and about ourselves. What follows is a search through the ashes of a discredited ancestor—Masud Khan—for a deeper understanding of his life and theories, and for those of his analysts Donald Winnicott and Anna Freud, as well as his colleagues Andre Green, JB Pontalis, Ralph Greenson, Robert Stoller, and Marion Milner, among others active in the formative days of psychoanalysis. Further, I excerpt from the Work Books at length not only to show the arc of Khan’s thinking, but to trace how my discovery of him led to further discovery of myself. Particular entries focus on Khan’s writing process and what I experience as its clarifying resonance, insights into well-known professional ancestors, and a foreshadowing of relational thinking. Finally, I discuss how my interest in the impact of the analyst’s subjectivity on theory and technique has both led to and deepened as a result of this exploration.