Quotes about Ancestry

I've just figured out she is thirty-one-and-a-quarter-per-cent English, twenty-seven-and-a-half-per-cent Irish, twenty-five-per-cent German, eighty-and-three-quarters-per-cent Dutch, seven-and-a-half-per-cent Scotch, one-hundred-per-cent wonderful.

Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us; our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.

Given that we are all descended from Adam and Eve, genetic defects as a result of intra-family marriage would not begin to crop up until after the first few dozen generations.

I'm tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro - that's the Scotch-Irish part.

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.

This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time.

I dropped to the ground and swept my hand across the smooth yellow tile. Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there had been no shame in your father's before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us.

The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children.

I knew I was born at the North but hoped nobody would find it out. I looked upon the misfortune as something so shrouded by time and distance that maybe nobody remembered it.

If the grandfather of the grandfather of Jesus had known what was hidden within him, he would have stood humble and awe-struck before his soul.

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

I made no attempt to wipe away the tears. I could not claim a forefather who came to America on the Mayflower. Nor did any ancestor of mine amass riches to leave me free from toil. My great-grandparents were illiterate when their fellow men were signing the Declaration of Independence, and the first families of my people were bought separately and sold apart, nameless and without traces — yet there was this: 'Deep River My home is over Jordan.