Quotes About Genealogy

There's a rumor that my great-grandmother was 6'7''. I don't know if it's necessarily true, but that's a big woman.

If I can go three grandmothers back and find a slave, that means someone else can go three grandmothers back and find a slave owner. When you interrogate your histories, it forces you to rethink who you are and where you are.

We went to the British Museum, and I was looking up my family in the books - pages and pages on it.

un grand usage de l'insulte généalogique (« Fils de bourgeois

Our actual ultimate root is in our humanity, not in our personal genealogy.

I don't know who my grandfather was; I'm much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.

brain activity in a heartbeat. All of that says Richard. But the DNA in consort with the paper trail of a genealogy available only for royalty says this was him. Richard III is now the oldest person to be unequivocally identified in death.

We only have to go back a few dozen centuries to see that most of the 7 billion of us alive today are descended from a tiny handful of people, the population of a village.

Something on the order of 107 billion modern humans have existed, though this number depends on when exactly you start counting. All of them—of us—are close cousins, because our species has a single African origin.

most recent common ancestor of everyone alive today on Earth lived only around 3,400 years ago.

on a long enough timeline we're all inbred.

everyone alive of European descent would be able to select a line that would cross everyone else's around the time of Richard II.

One fifth of people alive a millennium ago in Europe are the ancestors of no one alive today. Their lines of descent petered out at some point, when they or one of their progeny did not leave any of their own.

genetic genealogy companies will sell you kits that claim to grant you membership to historical peoples, albeit ill-defined, highly romanticized versions of ancient Europeans. This type of genetic astrology, though unscientific and distasteful to my palate, is really just a bit of meaningless fantasy; its real damage is that it undermines scientific literacy in the general public.

Despite our differences, all humans are remarkably close relatives, and our family tree is pollarded, and tortuous, and not in the slightest bit like a tree. But we are the fruit thereof.

I don't know much about my biological background.

I've learned there are many genealogies. Within our family is a genealogy of rage. There is also a genealogy of justice. I would show you a map, but I am still searching the roadway for casualties.

Keiner dieser Aufsätze beabsichtigt, die Materialität des Körpers zu bestreiten; sie stellen vielmehr partielle und sich überschneidende genealogische Bemühungen dar, die normativen Bedingungen zu klären, unter denen die Materialität des Körpers gestaltet und gebildet wird, und insbesondere, wie sie durch differentielle Kategorien des Geschlechts gebildet wird.

How convenient it would be to many of our great men and great families of doubtful origin, could they have the privilege of the heroes of yore, who, whenever their origin was involved in obscurity, modestly announced themselves descended from a god.

Infant wart hogs resemble both sides of the family.

The Soviet Union came apart along ethnic lines. The most important factor in this breakup was the disinclination of Slavic Ukraine to continue under a regime dominated by Slavic Russia. Yugoslavia came apart also, beginning with a brutal clash between Serbia and Croatia, here again 'nations' with only the smallest differences in genealogy; with, indeed, practically a common language. Ethnic conflict does not require great differences; small will do.

He contends that Jesus had a human mother and a human father (someone other than Joseph). Jesus also had five siblings, including four who became members of his self-selected "council of the twelve," whom we know as the twelve apostles.

Davidic lineage of Jesus was so important to the early Christians it is likely that Luke had one of these records available to him.

A person in search of his ancestors naturally likes to believe the best of them, and the best in terms of contemporary standards. Where genealogical facts are few, and these located in the remote past, reconstruction of family history is often more imaginative than correct.