Quotes About Ancestry

There's a lot of 'ancestor tourism': and people will go back to Ireland to touch ground and have a pint in the same place where their forefathers once did whatever their forefathers did, and there's a real strong idea that we connect to the place once we get there.

When you're a second- or third-generation migrant, your ties to your heritage can feel a little precarious. You're a foreigner here, you're a tourist back in your ancestral land, and home is the magpie nest you construct of the bits of culture you're able to hold close.

My maternal great-grandfather Don Juan del Gallego was a Spanish adventurer from Asturias, Spain. He sailed on a galleon ship to the Philippines. He then went to the Bicol region to build a town that eventually became known as Del Gallego.

She wanted us to feel we were above everyone in the town. She really did tell us that we were related to Chief Justice John Marshall, and that may have been true. I never did bother to find out.

My own conviction is, confirmed by a very close study of parochial registers, that some of the very best blood in England is to be found among the tradesmen of our county towns.

On the Italian side, we can trace the family back 2,000 years. I have a cousin in Rome, a famous archaeologist, Count Andrea Carandini, who was in Lombardy and came across some pottery with the original name of the family, Carandinus, painted on it.

It can be very difficult to trace your birth parents.

People like to trace their ancestry.

Latinos are not monochromatic. You know, they trace their ancestry back to South America, to Central America, to Mexico, like in my family, and the Caribbean. And it's - we're a very diverse group. And we care about a lot more than just immigration, though we're passionate about having sensible immigration policies that don't go after our families.

I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.

The other piece about tracing your ancestry is it makes you slightly more empathetic about what happens today. As we seem to have lost a certain sense of humanity for and among each other.

My grandfather did not travel across 4,000 miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this country overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland.

Why waste your money looking up your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponent will do it for you.

Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

Before most people start boasting about their family tree, they already have done a good pruning job.

Everyone has a family tree; the Dawsons have one, it's a weeping willow.

Some family trees bear an enormous crop of nuts.

Many a family tree needs trimming

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.

He was not merely a chip off the old block, but the old block itself.

Oh sure, I have a few black people in my family tree. They're probably still hanging there.

It's the greatest of Southern honors . . . to have one's name incorporated into a family tree. It's an honor not lightly given.