Best 75 quotes in «genealogy quotes» category

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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?

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

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.

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.

Every family's its own trip to China.

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

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

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.

Everyone has a story. Every story matters.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

I suppose it must be admitted that I was raised in a "dysfunctional" family, but in truth, I do not think I had any sense of that as I was growing up. Probably part of the reason was that all of my extended kin had families at least as dysfunctional as mine. Just to give a little of the flavor of it, my "Aunt Fern," who lived just across the street and was one of the most present and puissant female relatives in my life, was, to be genealogically precise, my mother's brother's, first wife's, second husband's, father's, 3rd, 4th, and 5th wife. (She married "Uncle Lew" three times in the course of her seven matrimonial ventures.)

In united families, they might sleep with half filled stomach but no one sleeps with empty stomach.

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

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

Look to the past to see what the future holds.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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