Quotes About Ancestry

I was researching my family tree, and I was deeply hoping I was going to turn out to be Eastern European, but I'm not.

Everyone in my family has been in music - my cousins, my grandmother, my grandfather - so it's quite a big family tree.

If I start tracing, I bet I will find a writer in my family tree.

You can't ever make assumptions about a family tree.

When I looked at the family tree and at where my ancestors lived, it was places like Rothbury and Tropton! I was going, 'No, that can't be the reason why I feel so at home there.' But could it be in my DNA? It's kind of shocking.

So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and... Wanda Sykes and John Legend... we're adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that's the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship.

It's impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece together their families' pasts, don't include our non-European ancestors.

I have a profound interest in embroidery, as I have female ancestors on both sides who embroidered their way through great trials.

I have a deep tribal sense. I grew up in a synagogue that my ancestors built. I sat in the third row. My family was decent. They were good people; they were handshake people. So I never had a sense of rebellion.

I wanted to know who my people were. And I - I think like a lot of Americans - thought that I could find those people in the past. I could find this mythic tribe of elders who would ground me in a story that was irrefutable, undeniable, that was unique and my own, and it would satisfy all my cravings.

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

Sioux was always a horse culture, especially the Lakota Sioux. My mom is from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation; my dad is from a Sioux Indian reservation. Both tribes are Lakota.

I do everything I do to pay tribute to my great-grandfather.

It's too late for you Wilhelmina Grimm, great great great granddaughter of Wilhelm Grimm.

The theater, when it is potent enough to deserve its ancestry, is always dangerous; that is why it is instinctively feared by people who do not want change, but only preservation of the status quo.

If you don't know where you come from, then you want know when you'er being taken back.

There had been Seligmans in Baiersdorf for over a century. Theirs had been a family name long before Napoleon had decreed that Germany's Jews no longer needed to be known as "sons" of their fathers' names—Moses ben Israel, and so on. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tombstones in Baiersdorf's Jewish cemetery recorded the upright virtues of many of David's ancestors, all named Seligman ("Blessed man" in German).

documenting Darwin's picture of the history of life. If Darwin is right, Agassiz argued, then we should find not just one or a few missing links, but innumerable links shading almost imperceptibly from alleged ancestors to presumed descendants.

Darwin's Origin explained many classes of biological evidence with just two central organizing ideas. The twin pillars of his theory were the ideas of universal common ancestry and natural selection.

Oxford biologists Alan Cooper and Richard Fortey depict the Ediacaran fauna as lying on a line of descent separate from the Cambrian animals rather than being ancestral to them.23

This absence of clear affinities has led an increasing number of paleontologists to reject ancestor-descendant relationships between all but (at most) a few of the Ediacaran and Cambrian fauna.

His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. It was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.

It turns out that, far from the world being a common genetic melting pot with massive to-and-fro prehistoric movements and mixings, the majority of the members of the modern human diaspora have conservatively stayed put in the colonies their ancestors first established. They

Call Malcolm Price (Pricey) a 'chancer' and you would be wrong. Pricey has, with premeditated determination, won his battles and hung his gloves up; his story is no less dramatic or tantalising than that of his Welsh ancestors.