Quotes About Ancestry

No one here has to know who I really am. Ever. They can never know. We disappeared with my father, our historic bloodline ended forever.

It's strange how you can feel guilty for a family history you didn't have anything to do with, isn't it?

his name possibly handed down through generations like an heirloom—a coin or a favorite piece of jewelry—from long-dead ancestors who possessed no tokens to pass along, save for their names and their stories.

To my grandmothers, for tilling the soil in which we grew and for watering our roots with stories of all the old things

Less than ten thousand Choctaw people actually made it here on the Trail of Tears, and they all married each other way back when, so there you go. We're all family somehow or other.

May your names never go unspoken and your stories forever be told.

The days of recording family births, deaths and marriages in the family Bible were far distant.

My life shall be free and broad and great, and I will not be the slave to the sense delights which chained my ancient ancestry. I reject the heritage. I break the entail. And who are you to say I am unwise?

As she held her new baby in her arms, it had hit hard—it was the first time in her life she was looking at family who looked like her. And it made her think that there were more people out there of her blood. Her curiosity grew intense.

You couldn't guess at a breed to look at him, but at least one of his parents must have been a wooly mammoth.

Once, we all lived in the sea," the grandmother had told her. "Its salt runs in our blood; our tears are memories of the ocean.

Since I was five, I've known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one's own origins.

Forgetting the past is forgetting our roots and our basic structure.

Every family has a story that it tells itself, that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates, some parts are sharpened, others dropped, and there is often debate about what really happened. But even with these different sides of the same story, there is still agreement that this is the family story.

I think history is inextricably linked to identity. If you don't know your history, if you don't know your family, who are you?

A person who does not remember where he came from will never reach his destination.

I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.

My first advice on how not to grow old would be to choose you ancestors carefully.

I am the highest ranking woman in this land, and I know who I am, where I came from and where I am going. I know the traditions of my people and I have honored them all my life (The Conversion Of Ka'ahumanu 16)

IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I returned again and again to what people call my homeland, where my parents were born, as was I. But for the Vietnamese, the homeland is not simply the country of origin. It is the village where one's father was born and where one's father was buried. My father's father died where he was supposed to, as my father will not and as I will not, in the province of his birth, his mausoleum thirty minutes from Ho Chi Minh's birthplace.

We descend from Jove; in ancestral Jove Troy's sons rejoice.

Yet did you know that every dog alive today has a little wolf DNA? Not just huskies, who often look like wolves, but pugs, corgis, poodles? Chuhuahuas - they sometimes act like they still are wolves.

All the men in my family were bearded, and most of the women.

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common fear of its neighbors.