Best 75 quotes in «genealogy quotes» category

It was an early saying here [Massachusetts] that there were 'Roots enough to plant Hampshire County and Gunns enough to defend them.

I wish that I would have asked my grandparents more about their early lives in Italy when I had the chance to do so.

Meditation works in many layers. It works in our genes, in our DNA

Look to the past to see what the future holds.

My forebears played a significant part in making me who I am. I honor their legacy. I will never forget what they gave me. I will love them until the day I die. And no one can take them away from me.

My annual pilgrimages to the dead involve a good deal of talking to myself (which serves as my principal internal gyroscope) and increasingly confirm that the older I get the more the dead take hold of me. I like the notion that my heart is a temple of memory in which they intermittently reside. I feel compelled, in some way or other, to complete their lives, to honor their gifts and sacrifices.

My family tree has many branches, both living and dead... but all equally important. I cherish the memories that make its roots run deep.

One can never be 100% certain when it comes to family lineage. One must always keep an open mind, willing to go wherever the facts may lead.

No matter who our ancestors are, our own personal and monumental task is to become the best person that we can possibly be - someone in whom our own descendants in times to come can take great pride and find inspiration.

Nuclear didn't describe families. How could it? Dry physics was not equal to that task. In the twentieth century we needed a biological metaphor, Darwinian in scope, to suggest the gnash and crash of carnivorous life in the family gene pool. But for the 21st century, the new century, I think the metaphors must be chemical. Molecular. In the molecular family people are connected without being bound. They spindle themselves around shared experiences and affections rather than splashing in the shared gene pool.

One could only wish there were more who understood the love of family, of history, and of ancient, sacred bonds that grow deep within us all. If family is not worthy of our time and attention, who or what is?

Our stories make us who we are. And each story has its own purpose and its own reward. Each story rings true and each story is worthy of the ages. There is no such thing as an insignificant life.

Politics is always related to the history and genealogy.

Over the course of the millennia, all these multitudes of ancestors, generation upon generation, have come down to this moment in time—to give birth to you. There has never been, nor will ever be, another like you. You have been given a tremendous responsibility. You carry the hopes and dreams of all those who have gone before. Hopes and dreams for a better world. What will you do with your time on this Earth? How will you contribute to the ongoing story of humankind?

Rather than following a [genealogical] 'line', I find myself drawn to all the people I encounter, including those who, only by the most obtuse reckoning, can be thought of as relatives. Every life deserves telling; none is without drama and change.

Pursuing a family history beyond a simple catalogue of names is always evidence of separation, of severing ties at least to the extent of holding one’s relations at arm’s length. The family member who want to make a private gift of a family tree to a close circle of relatives soon becomes the historian who estranges her antecedents by locating them “in history”. I found that family history, which humanizes those who might otherwise be mere faces in a crowd, also defamiliarized those closest to me, giving their lives a larger pattern than they had when they were lived. They became both more and less themselves. I consoled myself by thinking that this is what history does to us too. As we grow older we see not how unique our lives have been, but how representative we were and are; that we are part of the figure in the carpet woven by events, by chance and accident, and by the play of forces more powerful than us.

Racists cling to the false notion that we are separate. They refuse to acknowledge that they are connected to, and even descended from, other people of different skin color. Their egos demand that they be superior and that others be inferior. This is how they seek to justify their hatred of, and cruelty towards, others.

Some of us are given more time on this Earth than others, but none of us should ever take the gift of life for granted. If we strive to be the best we can be, committing ourselves to what is right and true, while helping others along the way, then we will leave our own story worth the telling and be a shining example for our children and our grandchildren and all those great, great, great, great grandchildren in those far off times to come.

Some of us can live without a society but not without a family.

She is my companion on my many genealogical hunts, and I will be forever indebted to her for the knowledge that she bequeathed to me. And I can think of nobody I would rather traipse through a cemetery with, and that says a lot about a person.

The family historian must master the art of storytelling. What, after all, is truth without anecdote, history without events, explanation without narration--or yet life itself without a story? Stories are not just the wells from which we drink most deeply but at the same time the golden threads that hold and bind--Ariadne's precious string that leads us through the labyrinth that connects living present and the living past.

Spending her eighties in constant thrall to findmypast.com, familyhistory.net.au, yesterdaygeneaology.com and ancestor.com, Aunty Eily had tracked down the 1850s address of Conor Cleary’s father Daniel and mother Maureen to 28 New Way, Templemore. The street still existed and the Avis car’s GPS took Ryan there. Pg 248

The sacrifice our ancestors gave yesterday Gave us today and our tomorrow

The first chapter of Matthew begins with giving a genealogy of Jesus Christ; and in the third chapter of Luke there is also given a genealogy of Jesus Christ. Did these two agree, it would not prove the genealogy to be true, because it might nevertheless be a fabrication; but as they contradict each other in every particular, it proves falsehood absolutely. If Matthew speaks truth, Luke speaks falsehood; and if Luke speaks truth, Matthew speaks falsehood: and as there is no authority for believing one more than the other, there is no authority for believing either; and if they cannot be believed even in the very first thing they say, and set out to prove, they are not entitled to be believed in any thing they say afterwards. Truth is an uniform thing; and as to inspiration and revelation, were we to admit it, it is impossible to suppose it can be contradictory. Either then the men called apostles were imposters, or the books ascribed to them have been written by other persons, and fathered upon them, as is the case in the Old Testament. Now, if these men, Matthew and Luke, set out with a falsehood between them (as these two accounts show they do) in the very commencement of their history of Jesus Christ, and of who, and of what he was, what authority (as I have before asked) is there left for believing the strange things they tell us afterwards? If they cannot be believed in their account of his natural genealogy, how are we to believe them when they tell us he was the son of God, begotten by a ghost; and that an angel announced this in secret to his mother? If they lied in one genealogy, why are we to believe them in the other? If his natural genealogy be manufactured, which it certainly is, why are we not to suppose that his celestial genealogy is manufactured also, and that the whole is fabulous? Can any man of serious reflection hazard his future happiness upon the belief of a story naturally impossible, repugnant to every idea of decency, and related by persons already detected of falsehood?

... the pursuit of origins is a way of rescuing territory from death and oblivion, a reconquest that ought to be patient, devoted, relentless and faithful.

To be American is to long for whatever our parents fled.

…the understanding of any person is an exercise in genealogy. A man is not a static organism to be taken apart and analyzed and classified. A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. He runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime. The proper study of mankind is man, but man is an endless curve on the eternal graph paper, and who can see the whole curve?

The story of his great-grandfather . . . was his own story, too.

Through the various branches of your tree, you are connected to the entirety of human history. When we talk about the ancient Egyptians building the pyramids, we're not talking about a bunch of exotic strangers, we're talking about our great-great-many-times-great grandparents!

Wars, plagues, names upon tombs tell us only what happened. But history lies in the cracks in between. In the inexplicable, invisible turns and decisions. A person saying no instead of yes. …It is not that they had lived…but how.

Tradition is the glue that binds past with present, and eventually with the future. As traditions are passed down, we get a chance to reach back and touch one small part of our history.

Ultimately, the great truths of family history don't live in any book. They live in the hearts and minds of the living descendants. They live in the way we conduct our lives, in the passing of traditions and values to those who will follow.

We are all descendants of murderers and thieves.

..what the next generation will value most is not what we owned, but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we lived. In the end, it's the family stories that are worth the storage.

We are all the product of things we've never seen and people we never met. In fact, if just one little detail had been changed in their lives, we may not even exist!

We are just stars in our family's constellation

We live in a culture in which we are led to believe that anything you do not get paid for is not worth doing. As a consequence, the things that don't get done are often the most worthwhile.

We are the accumulation of the dreams of generations

Woven of fad and fancy, commerce and technology, war and revolution, freedom and necessity, our individual histories testify to the singular but crooked paths along which we traveled to the present.

When you trace your genealogy, you find connections to many of the people and events that shaped history. History is not the story of some old irrelevant strangers. No. History is your story. Your family was there - your grandmothers and grandfathers, uncles and aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces. If not for them, you wouldn't even be here.

Your ancestors are rooting for you.

You are so engrossed in the fact that you are oblivious to its environment

You can take the Indian out of the family, but you cannot take the family out of the Indian.

I am deeply interested in this work. I am anxious to encourage the people to press on in securing their genealogies and after doing so in laboring in our temples.

But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before.

Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.

It is possible to imagine a society flushed with such a sense of power that it could afford to let its offenders go unpunished.

I am very into genealogy and heritage, and that's how I started writing.

All our ancestors were murdered, murderers, complicit to murder, or combating murder.

I do not criticize religion as such, but I criticize the concept and the definition of "religion" - as I said in Genealogies.