Quotes About Ancestry

I'm enormously proud of being the ancestor of a convict. That's mad, isn't it, but I really am.

My nan and granddad are from Cork.

I live in the county where my mother was born and buried.

I think my ancestors had to be enormously strong emotionally and very courageous.

There was a woman in Elizabeth I's court that happened to have the same family name as me.

My cultural roots are something illusive.

I was never obsessed with being adopted. I was simply curious about my biological parents.

I've danced hula since I was 5. My mom danced hula as well. It's been in my family from far back and really connected me to my ancestors.

But now all of a sudden some idiots in Taiwan start to say that they are not Chinese. Their grand parents were Chinese. But for some reason, they feel they are not Chinese.

I love many places to which I have no connection, but identifying an ancestor, or someone I think is an ancestor, has taken me to places I'd never have gone to otherwise.

True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.

Growing up, my mother and grandparents often talked about our family's Native American heritage. As a kid, I never thought to ask them for documentation - what kid would?

I remember the words of my grandmother who died at 102. I remember my great mother, Grand Brika, who died at the age of 106. They talked to us all the time. And my grandmother even lied to me. She said there was royalty. She said that my great-great-great grandfather was the king of the outer Thembu.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.

As my name might suggest, I'm Jewish. My grandparents were Polish and Russian Jews who came to Australia in the late 1920s, and had they not, we wouldn't be talking now.

I think we were born 6 feet tall and then started to grow from there. My dad's not particularly tall - only 5 feet, 11 inches - but his mother was almost 6 feet and straight as a ramrod: a German woman who used to scare the hell out of me.

I'm a bit taller too because I've got Mum's legs and Dad was a bit more squat and well-built than me. My brother Andrew is a bit more like Dad.

When you have a natural genetic tan developed over centuries and many generations, the idea of soaking up rays by the pool has never made sense.

I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?

I come from a long line of tall-tale talkers. Our family crest is bullets over crossed fingers and underneath it says, 'Bullshit Über Alles.

Just like our story, the original Christmas tales were stories of searching, not so much for the lost, as for the familiar. Mary and Joseph sought in Bethlehem- the home of their familial ancestry- a place to start their own family; the three kings from the East journeyed beneath the sentinel star to find the King of Kings; and the shepherds sought a child in a place most familiar to them: a manger.

We all swim deep in the river of our ancestry.

You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . . .

Ark, he was called. His real name was Hyath Arkajanian, and he was Armenian or Lithuanian or something, I couldn't remember for sure