No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.
I'm very aware of my own background. I'm Irish, French, and then a little bit of everything else thrown in, ranging from German to Native American. We're talking about tiny drops of blood.
My father's family can be traced back to 1400. I've been told by gypsies that there is unmistakeably gypsy blood in me. Lee is a gypsy name, you know.
Neither my father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, great grandfather or great grandmother, nor any other relation that I know of, or care a farthing for, has been in England these one hundred and fifty years; so that you see I have not one drop of blood in my veins but what is American.
I must admit, even though I'm the product of two Jewish parents, I think the Irish temper got in there somewhere, so I'm going to check Mom's genealogy.
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.
Tom Hanks, who starred in 'The Da Vinci Code,' turns out to be related to a number of the historic characters that feature in 'The Da Vinci Code,' including William the Conqueror and Shakespeare.
I come from Texas, and my grandmother and mother were born in Arkansas.
If the husband be a slave and the wife a free woman, the children shall be free like their mother. If the husband be free and the wife a slave, the children shall be slaves.
Louisiana was then a possession of France
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.
The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past.
People will not look forward to posterity who are not anxious to look backward to their ancestry
Not long before my mother died, I found a long-lost portrait of Jane Franklin's granddaughter, Jane Flagg, aged nine - oil on canvas - in the basement of a public library not a dozen miles from my mother's house.
It is possible to imagine a society flushed with such a sense of power that it could afford to let its offenders go unpunished.
We started the family Bible after slavery was abolished. My great-grandmother remembered the Bible being started, which meant that she was a slave as a young girl. When she died, the Bible was at least 105 years old, so she must have been nearly 115 years old. Her daughter, my grandmother, died at 97, and her husband at 98.
You can experience true delight on the Sabbath from family history work...Finding family members...can bring immense joy.
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.
Well, I am actually a daughter of the American Revolution
Maybe if I go far enough back into my ancestry, I have African roots or something. I've got no idea.
Anne Romaine collected her own parallel archive to [Alex] Haley.
I had a buddy of mine call up the other day, all upset 'cause he slept with his third cousin. And I'm like, Man, if it upsets you that much, quit countin' them!
We should all know our family's story, all the more so if nobody tells it to us directly and we have to find it out for ourselves.
Well, I was born to people raised in 1889.
I find my husband's family history fascinating, as they can trace the family lineage back to ancestors who fought, and died, in the first battle of the Revolution, as well as to many other interesting people.
To my astonishment, everything that I had assumed was now questioned by the findings. What started off as a search for identity that appeared to be purely Scottish in origin ended up as a discovery of my migrant roots - indeed an understanding that almost all of our families, at some stage, have been migrants - and my European roots.
