Best 75 quotes in «genealogy quotes» category

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

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!

…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?

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.

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.

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 the accumulation of the dreams of generations

We are all descendants of murderers and thieves.

We are just stars in our family's constellation

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!

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.

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.

..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.

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

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

Your ancestors are rooting for you.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everyone has a story. Every story matters.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I leaned back against the hearth, and the fire's warmth and fluttering light lulled me into gentler thoughts of Francesca. I closed my eyes and saw the beloved face dominated by wide-set antelope eyes. Her eyebrows arched like the wings of a swan, and the whites of her eyes, almost bluish, made a startling contrast to her caramel skin. I later learned that her great-great-grandmother had been kidnapped by slavers in Turkey, brought to Venice, and then sold to a German trader. It was a common story in Venice. Francesca's more recent ancestors had been German and Italian, and the result was a mix of northern ice and Mediterranean warmth. Francesca's upper lip curved in that sensual way that caused jealous Muslim husbands to veil their wives' faces. Her smoldering Levantine beauty contrasted with her silver-blond Teutonic hair, shockingly fair next to her dusky complexion and the sultry hint of Byzantium flashing in her dark eyes. Her nostrils were shaped like perfect teardrops.

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