Best 75 quotes in «genealogy quotes» category

All of us are part of a beautiful pageantry of human experience. Let us make the most of this life in all we do.

The genealogy of blessing always traces back to God-ordained risk.

All of our ancestors live within each one of us whether we are aware of it or not.

All of our ancestors give us the precious gift of life. Do we use it wisely? Do we use it well? Do we make a name for ourselves and for our children of which we can be proud?

An honest, poor, but otherwise unremarkable man and his loving, tender-hearted wife, though long forgotten and lost to history, may have been the ancestors who are most worthy of our admiration today.

A person in search of his ancestors naturally likes to believe the best of them, and the best in terms of contemporary standards. Where genealogical facts are few, and these located in the remote past, reconstruction of family history is often more imaginative than correct.

Every family's its own trip to China.

As a genealogist, I have seen the Big Picture as very few have. Most people now living have no clue who they are or where they come from. We are all descended from the ancient kings of our various cultures. There is nothing unique about it. And let's be honest, most of those kings were pretty ruthless individuals. What's important for us today is that we wake up to the fact that we are all literally cousins. How would our world change if we honored that relationship and started treating one another as family?

But, then, what is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them in the language of naive positivity.

Everyone has a story. Every story matters.

Every succeeding generation has the opportunity to heal the wounds of the past.

Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.

He'd viewed the past like Uncle Joseph's grave, an empty hole without life, waiting to be filled in by him. It never occurred to him that Paradis, the Marais Foncé, or the ridge, existed before he had the eyes to see them, or that older people had once been young. Now his eyes were opened and he wanted to understand the past." Jean Baptiste, The Last Lord of Paradise––Generation Two

History doesn’t move you more than when it’s in the iron of your own blood.

Do try The House by fresh new author, Susannah Mansfield, it's funny, sad and very different, you'll love the characters and the stories.

In your name, the family name is at last because it's the family name that lasts.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

Politics is always related to the history and genealogy.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

..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.

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.

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.

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.

Your ancestors are rooting for you.

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.

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.

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

History will be kind to me for I have written it. Winston Churchill

How can we know where we are going if we don’t know where we came from?

If you can make your ancestors real for yourself, learn their stories and who they were, your life - and death - will take on added meaning. You will see yourself in the Big Picture that includes all human life that has come and gone on the planet.

If you don't know history, you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.

I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative, lacking any historical significance. The narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores.

I have had my mother's wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the National Geographic tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way of the Levant, and passing through Eastern and Central Europe before crossing to the British Isles. And all of this knowable by an analysis of the cells on the inside of my mouth. I almost prefer the more rambling and indirect and journalistic investigation, which seems somehow less… deterministic.