Quotes About Ancestry

Mans true taproots are nourished in the sequence of generations, and he loses his taproots in disrupted developmental time, not in abandoned localities.

I was a tried seaman when, for the first time, I set foot upon the soil of my country, and took up my residence where my people had lived for over two hundred years.

I carry my roots with me all the time rolled up, I use them as my pillow.

Surely an American doesn't want to get it wrong; if there is anything that England stands for, with its quiet central squares, its tweeds and twin sets and teas, the tight-lipped precision of its speech, it is that there is a right way to do things. This is where the right way has its ancestral home.

It isn't often one gets the chance to entertain one's great-great-great-grandmother. Sassinak.

A man should be proud of his heritage—not arrogant, as if it made him superior, but happy to own it and live up to the best in its promise. Monk

You know nothing... And suppose the vampire who made you knew nothing, and the vampire who made that vampire knew nothing, and the vampire before him knew nothing, and so it goes back and back, nothing proceeding from nothing, until there is nothing! And we must live with the knowledge that there is no knowledge.

Genealogy belongs to the rich in human history. The poor rise and fall without leaving a footprint.

One thing we can give each other is our history.

He glanced at the huge somber portrait of Manfred Blackwood, my venerable ancestor.

The Mayfairs, what are they to me? And what is a great family, a rich family?

Manfred was the patriarch, and William was his son. William begat Gravier. Gravier begat Pops. And Pops, late in life when he and Sweetheart had despaired of having a child, begat Patsy. At age sixteen, Patsy gave birth to me and named me Tarquin Anthony Blackwood. As to my father, let me state now plainly and unequivocally that I don't have one. "Patsy

ancestor, and the combination was

Is Jensen really your name? she asked when he sat down again, closing the knife and tucking it back into his pocket. Does it matter? I've used any number of names. Jensen, Davidson, Wilson, Madsen. In other words your mother didn't know who your father was.

He must have some Tartar in him, don't you think?" "I have no idea," Kate said. "Or is it 'Tatar.

Inventing the rules of slavery, in 1662, Virginians decided to adopt the Roman rule partus sequitur ventrem, which says that you were what your mother was. 14

When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs," Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, "[yet] if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.

Between the two of us, we've got a family tree rooted in Hell!

I have never thought I could take it, not even for the children. It is all I have wanted to do, to stand between them and and pain. But I come from a long line of women who put themselves first.

The idea that traumatic residues—or unresolved stories—can be inherited is groundbreaking.

My parents came from poor people who came from poor people who came from poor people, all the way back to the very first poor people.

More and more, he heard his spine playing stick games through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years.

Even Crazy Horse, the famous Oglala warrior, was named for his father. But nobody called him Junior, for rather logical reasons. "Look! There's the most feared and mysterious Indian of all time! Behold! It is Junior!

Oh, yeah, insanity ran deep in the roots of that family tree.' (Talon)