#genealogy

Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own. ↗

— Ambrose Bierce

#care #descent #did #genealogy #his

Most people get excited over new cars; I get excited over death certificates. It's no wonder my husband worries about my state of mind. ↗

— Rett MacPherson

#humor #death

There's a boom in genealogy now. With ancestry.com and other sites digitizing so many of the records, you can now find things in a few minutes that used to take months. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#boom #com #few #find #genealogy

She is my companion on my many genealogical hunts, and I will be forever indebted to her for the knowledge that she bequeathed to me. And I can think of nobody I would rather traipse through a cemetery with, and that says a lot about a person. ↗

— Rett MacPherson

#humor #family

History is the essence of innumerable biographies. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#genealogy #history #people #biography

We are all the product of things we've never seen and people we never met. In fact, if just one little detail had been changed in their lives, we may not even exist! ↗

— Melanie Johnston

#genealogy #the-last-lord-of-paradise #change

Nuclear didn't describe families. How could it? Dry physics was not equal to that task. In the twentieth century we needed a biological metaphor, Darwinian in scope, to suggest the gnash and crash of carnivorous life in the family gene pool. But for the 21st century, the new century, I think the metaphors must be chemical. Molecular. In the molecular family people are connected without being bound. They spindle themselves around shared experiences and affections rather than splashing in the shared gene pool. ↗

— Laura Kalpakian

#relations #equality

But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before. ↗

— Bob Edwards

#anything #before #being #ever #genealogy

A friend of ours has a hobby doing genealogy, and we found out that we were cousins in the ninth degree, that we had a common ancestor on the Mayflower. ↗

— Marion Zimmer Bradley

#cousins #degree #doing #found #friend

In belief in what? In love with what? In hope for what?—There’s no doubt that these weak people—at some time or another they also want to be the strong people, some day their "kingdom" is to arrive—they call it simply "the kingdom of God" as I mentioned. People are indeed so humble about everything! Only to experience that, one has to live a long time, beyond death—in fact, people must have an eternal life, so they can also win eternal recompense in the "kingdom of God" for that earthly life "in faith, in love, in hope." Recompense for what? Recompense through what? In my view, Dante was grossly in error when, with an ingenuity inspiring terror, he set that inscription over the gateway into his hell:"Eternal love also created me." Over the gateway into the Christian paradise and its "eternal blessedness" it would, in any event, be more fitting to let the inscription stand "Eternal hate also created me"—provided it’s all right to set a truth over the gateway to a lie! For what is the bliss of that paradise? Perhaps we might have guessed that already, but it is better for it to be expressly described for us by an authority we cannot underestimate in such matters, Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint: "In the kingdom of heaven" he says as gently as a lamb, "the blessed will see the punishment of the damned, so that they will derive all the more pleasure from their heavenly bliss. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#death