Genealogy Quotes

Just a few quotes, some serious, some amusing, that have resonated with me. Know a good quote? Drop me a message with it and I'll add it to the page.

If you don't recount your family history, it will be lost. Honor your own stories and tell them too. The tales may not seem very important, but they are what binds families and makes each of us who we are.

by Madeleine L'Engle

Why waste your money looking up your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponent will do it for you.

by Mark Twain

Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.

by W. H. Auden

There is a story behind everything. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story because here is where yours begins.

by Mitch Albom

In every conceivable manner, the family is the link to our past and the bridge to our future.

by Alex Haley

How they contributed to what we are today. It goes to respecting their hardships and losses, their never giving in or giving up, their resoluteness to go on and build a life for their family.

It goes to deep pride that the fathers fought and some died to make and keep us a nation. It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing it for us. It is of equal pride and love that our mothers struggled to give us birth, without them we could not exist, and so we love each one, as far back as we can reach. That we might be born who we are. That we might remember them. So we do.

With love and caring and scribing each fact of their existence, because we are they and they are the sum of who we are. So, as a scribe called, I tell the story of my family. It is up to that one called in the next generation to answer the call and take my place in the long line of family storytellers. That is why I do my family genealogy, and that is what calls those young and old to step up and restore the memory or greet those who we had never known before.

by Della M. Cummings Wright; Rewritten by her granddaughter Dell Jo Ann McGinnis Johnson; Edited and Reworded by Tom Dunn, 1943.

The challenge I give you as a genealogist is to reach beyond the vital statistics to a new world of understanding, both of your ancestors and of yourself. Preserve those details of your family in written form that will bring understanding to many others and truly enable their hearts, along with your own, to turn to their fathers. Someone has said that there is little point in digging up an ancestor if your aren't going to make him live. If that is true, and I believe it is, your job is not finished until you feel a bit of what he felt, have shared vicariously in his joys and heartaches, perhaps shed a tear with him in his sorrow, laughed at the humor in his life, and felt pride in his accomplishments.

by Val D Greenwood

If you could see your ancestors all standing in a row, would you be proud of them or not? Or don't you really know? But here's another question which requires a different view. If you could meet your ancestors would they be proud of you?

by Nellie Winslow Simmons Randall

Your tombstone stands among the rest neglected and alone. The name and date are chiseled out on polished marble stone. It reaches out to all who care it is too late to mourn. You did not know that I exist, you died and I was born. Yet each of us are cells of you in flesh and blood and bone. Our blood contracts and beats a pulse entirely not our own. Dear ancestor, the place you filled one hundred years ago spreads out among the ones you left who would have loved you so. I wonder how you lived and loved. I wonder if you knew, that someday I would find this spot and come to visit you.

by Walter Butler Palmer

If you think your family is normal then you're probably not a genealogist

by Unknown

Genealogy. It's not the size of the tree that matters it's the quality of the nuts you find.

by Unknown

Eventually all genealogists come to their census.

by Unknown

If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.

by Michael Crichton

If you are lucky enough to be a genealogist, you are lucky enough.

by Ruth Padilla

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

by Helen Keller

We inherit from our ancestors gifts so often taken for granted. Each of us contains within this inheritance of soul. We are links between the ages, containing past and present expectations, sacred memories and future promise.

by Edward Sellner

We need to haunt the house of history and listen anew to the ancestors wisdom.

by Maya Angelou

To forget one's ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.

Chinese Proverb

If we tried to sink the past beneath our feet, be sure the future would not stand.

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.

by Robert Anton Wilson

The thing that interests me most about family history is the gap between the things we think we know about our families and the realities.

by Jeremy Hardy