Quotes About Ancestry

However precise the results offered by paternity testers, the truth was recognized by societies that flourished long before they appeared: that fatherhood means more than genes alone.

Family history isn't full of happy endings, Jefferson. You know that. And isn't that one of the allures of the job? It's the skeletons in the closet that get people like us out of bed in the morning, isn't it?

You can say it this way: if you learn to be less reactive to stress through the cultivation of flexibility pivots, the body starts turning off those reaction systems, including genetic expression switches that may have been originally thrown not by you but by your parents and grandparents. How cool is that?

My father died in 1957, just before I was born. My mother went to her Jewish aunt, who slammed the door in her face.

My grandfather was Scottish, born in the slums of Glasgow.

So my mom's folks are from one side of Greensboro - and, you know, outside of Greensboro. And my dad's folks, the white side, is from another very small town outside of Greensboro. So both sides are coming from the country.

antecedents

If you were to ask certain of your great-great-great-grandmothers, especially those who had a reputation for shyness, they might tell you some remarkable secrets, my dear Margarita Nikolayevna! To draw a parallel—the most amazing combinations can result if you shuffle the pack enough. There are some matters in which even class barriers and frontiers are powerless.

We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration

Her image of it came entirely from what she had heard. Or read. Or received unconsciously from distant ancestors. And yet it lived within her.

I love genealogical research. That's the reason I bought my first computer years ago to put my genealogy records on the computer. I've always enjoyed tracing family history.

My brother's researched our early family history. He found a letter from a fella who said he used to be in love with my mum.

My love of singing is hereditary.

My inspiration is love and history.

A true love can cross through your legacy and heritage.

What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?

We Szekelys2 have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races3

If we go far enough back, any two people on Earth have a common ancestor.

The family tree of each of us is graced by all those great inventors: the beings who first tried out self-replication, the manufacture of protein machine tools, the cell, cooperation, predation, symbiosis, photosynthesis, breathing oxygen, sex, hormones, brains, and all the rest-inventions we use, some of them, minute-by-minute without ever wondering who devised them and how much we owe to these unknown benefactors, in a chain 100 billion links long.

An oak tree and I are made of the same stuff. If you go far enough back, we have a common ancestor. The

Individual asexual organisms die by mistake - when the run out of something, or when they experience a lethal accident. Sexual organisms are designed to die, preprogrammed to do so. Death serves as a poignant reminder of our limitations and frailties - and of the bond with our ancestors who, in a way, died that we might live.

We achieve some measure of adulthood when we recognize our parents as they really were, without sentimentalizing or mythologizing, but also without blaming them unfairly for our imperfections. Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows. In this act of ancestral remembrance and acceptance may be found a light by which to see our children safely home.

Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.

What do you care?" Arik Siq asked. "Who your people were matters hardly at all. Who they are now is what matters. Who you are." "Your history is sometimes a way of understanding your present," Pan replied. "You are your history.