Quotes About Ancestry

It is awesome to feel you are carrying on the family name.

My family is Jamaican. We were just the slaves that were dropped off over there. And at the end of the day when you live and exist as a Black person in America, at least to white society, to a certain extent, no one is asking where you're from and where you were born.

I don't have a birth certificate.

I have been told for most of my life that the white man on my birth certificate is not my biological father and that my actual biological father is a light-skinned black man.

It's really cheesy, but basically, 'Roots' got me to find out my own roots.

Africa has a time-honored and brilliant civilization.

The Jewish part of me is superstitious.

I'm the son of a surgeon and the grandson of a surgeon.

My dad was an actor and a writer; my mum was a drama teacher. My grandma was an actress. My aunt is an actress. My granddad was a cameraman. They would've been surprised if I wanted to be a dentist or something like that.

Some friends said they weren't surprised to find out Napoleon and I were related, but it came as quite a shock to me.

My ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower--they met the boat. --Will Rogers

We also need to be willing to confront the emotions that may exist as a result of everything that's been passed down to us.

Eliminate your mother, then your two grandmothers, then your four great-grandmothers. Go back more generations and hundreds, then thousands disappear. Mothers vanish, and the fathers and mothers of those mothers. Ever more lives disappear as if unlived until you have narrowed a forest down to a tree, a web down to a line. This is what it takes to construct a linear narrative of blood or influence or meaning.

Toda a gente é influenciada por coisas que precedem a educação formal, que saem do nada e da vida do dia a dia. A essas influências excluídas chamo avós.

I think sometimes that I became a historian because I didn't have a history, but also because I was interested in telling the truth in a family in which truth was an elusive entity.

I always knew that my middle name was an anglicized version of a great-grandmother's name, but I dropped it in my teens, not liking its sound and feeling that a middle name was unnecessary, given how few people have my last name. Only now have I realized which great-grandmother that name belonged to, only writing this story do I know the name of that unknown woman and that it is also mine, or is now the blank space between my names.

I have a friend whose family tree has been traced back a thousand years, but no women exist on it. She just discovered that she herself did not exist, but her brothers did.

manism (ancestor cults)—but it was not as concerned

Herod was convert,after all. His mother was Arab. His people, the Idumeans, had come to Judaism only a generation or two earlier.

Our names were made for us in another century.

Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.

Just by chance, you could happen to give all your mother's versions to your child, and none of your father's. In this case, your father would have given no DNA to his grandchild. Of course such a scenario is highly unlikely, but as we go down to more distant descendants, total non-contribution of DNA becomes more possible.

No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch. A body is the genes' way of preserving the genes unaltered.

It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips