Ancestry

“ Ancestry in Royalty.—The pedigrees of royal families have proved to be of much importance in the study of human inheritance, not that royal traits are any more heritable than any other, but simply because the records have been carefully kept so that they are the most comprehensive and easily followed pedigrees available. The netlike weave of ancestry is particularly well exemplified in some of these families because of much close intermarriage. Their heritage typifies on an intensified scale the heritage of the mass of mankind. ”

“ The distinction between ancestry and race is more than simply one of plain language. The ability to trace one's ancestry to a particular progenitor at a single distant point in time may convey no information about one's own apparent or acknowledged race today. ”

“ Articles on the Sun-Ray origin of the Pyramids and Cuneiform Character
[Image] Edinburgh Castle, From the Vennel
AUTOBIOGRAPHY. CHAPTER 1. My Ancestry Our history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race, and our ancestors virtually live in us. The sentiment of ancestry seems to be inherent in human nature, especially in the more civilised races. At all events, we cannot help having a due regard for the history of our forefathers. Our curiosity is stimulated by their immediate or indirect influence upon ourselves. ”

“ And then, where larger populations arise, and different stocks are locally mingled, there are formed such groups within groups as those constituting, among the Romans, the family, the house, and the tribe: common ancestry being in all cases the bond. ”

“ Like so many other people, I came from a very old family, one from which there is good proof of an unbroken line through the Dark Ages, and all ages, to the first man. I have never given any time to tracing ancestry, but have a sort of quiet satisfaction that mine is certainly American as far as it well can be. ”

“ Ancestry a Network.—From the fact that each child has all of the ancestors of its mother as well as of its father, arises the great complications which are met with in determining the lineage of an individual. [Pg 4] A person has two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and thus following out pedigree it is plain to be seen that through this process of doubling in each generation, in the course of a few centuries one’s ancestry is apparently enormous. ”

“ But it is too fruitful a subject, this of hereditary resemblances,—the frequent recurrence of which, in a direct line, is truly unaccountable, when we consider how large an accumulation of ancestry lies behind every man at the distance of one or two centuries. ”

“ The personal interest surrounding those who have gained eminence carries us back over each step of their careers to their childhood, their parents, and their ancestry. [6] Pride of race adds its zest, and each race has its eulogists who claim every great man whose family tree reveals even a single ancestor, male or female, near or remote, of the eulogized race. ”

“ Even the descendant of the aboriginal possessors of America had been made to abandon the habits and opinions of his progenitors, to become a wanderer on that element which had laved the shores of his native land for ages, without exciting a wish to penetrate its mysteries in the bosoms of his simple-minded ancestry. ”

“ The antique-looking portraits that decorate many a modern, large house, by no means demonstrate the distinguished ancestry of the owner; but may merely simulate a distinguished ancestry. The coat of arms a wealthy man bears does not necessarily imply descent from men who once had their shields and flags covered by such marks of identity. ”

“ Thus each linguistic family affords at least partial evidence of race, proving, for instance, the existence of a common ancestry of the Irishman and the Russian, of the Jew and the Maltese, of the Tahitian and the Malagasy, though in such pairs of races the actual amount of common ancestry may be less than that of the different race-elements with which it has combined. ”

“ That is to say, the highest and the lowest, the blackest and the whitest, only differ in this, that some men began to keep records earlier than others; for the man who keeps no records loses track of his ancestors, and that is all. Not to mention other races, some of our own noblest English families trace back their ancestry to a favoured or successful person, who was of no hereditary distinction before he distinguished himself ”

“ Tour mind naturally reverts to your English ancestry, to those early settlers, the noble forefathers of this colony, who forsook their old homes and braved the perils of the deep till they reached these distant shores. ”

“ I think you should not set yourselves apart from those of your school-mates who cannot lay claim to distinguished ancestry, although I do believe in preserving the records of those families whose forefathers helped to make our country. ”

“ The Result of a Great Civilized Ancestry—Some of our Colored Americans, Their Doings and Their Personality The Colored Americans, as one of the great divisions of the human family, with as proud an ancestry and as high a civilization as the Jews, and co-eval with them in the point of cultured antiquity, are proving themselves as progressive and, with the additions of modern culture, civilization and progress, are building their race up to a high point of excellence. ”

“ After subtraction of the necessary amount for the greater likeness in training, that the individuals of like ancestry will have, whatever amount is left will necessarily, represent the actual inheritance of the child from its ancestors—parents, grandparents, and so on. ”

“ This is not the country to look for the blazonry and trappings of ancestry; merit alone claims and receives distinction; and none but the fool or the simpleton, ever pretends to boast of his ancestry and noble blood, or to offer it as a claim to respect or preferment. ”

“ To those whose traditions of ancestry all center about one locality, it costs a fearful struggle to tear up root and branch and strike out into unknown fields among people of a different type and class ”

“ Among them may be mentioned the accumulation of money, political preferment, the pride of ancestry, and professional attainments.
The pride of ancestry is a very laudable one, and no doubt it has a guiding influence in shaping the destiny of our lives. We discover it in the honor felt by the members of such societies as those of the Colonial wars, the Cincinnati, Sons of the Revolution, Aztec Club, Sons of Veterans, and many others. And it is true: "Those will not look forward to their posterity who never look backward to their ancestors." ”

“ I profess myself to be ignorant as to much that concerns my ancestry. When too young to have the smallest interest in the matter, I heard my two half-brothers and William Fairfax conversing on the subject of the origin of my family. ”

“ Their parents' parents had been similarly attracted and impelled, and so on back and back through the whole long line of ancestry, through half a million years to primitive men, back beyond them again through the long animal ancestry for scores of millions of years to the beginning of life. ”

“ In the poem we see the ancestry of each class under a sort of developing system—how the jarl and hersir are the progenitors of chiefs and kings; and we learn of odal, or of primogeniture and entail; of the hersir we learn nothing, except that he existed. ”

“ Since I am to speak to you of some of the important lessons of my life, it may be in order to give you some account of my ancestry. It is something to one's credit to have had an ancestry that one need not be ashamed of. ”

“ Their descendants have long ago been blended into the common life of the people of America, scarcely conscious of the fact that they might have the same pride in ancestry which the descendants of the Pilgrims delight to exhibit. ”

“ The native-born, whatever his descent, has all political and other rights possessed by him who traces his ancestry to the founding fathers. The foreign-born of races that are assimilable are admitted to all these privileges if they want them. ”

“ These people are descended from the best ancestry—Virginia and North Carolina—that traces back to England, [2] Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Theirs was, in the main, an educated ancestry; some of their forefathers read Latin, and some of them Greek. ”

“ Doubtless one of the reasons why the study of genealogy and the pride of ancestry have flourished most conspicuously in New England is that so large a proportion of the old population traces its ancestry back to the same period and to the same group of people. Even as early as the Revolution, the great bulk of the settlers of New England represented families that had been four or five generations on American soil. ”

“ In those organic individuals, of which we know that they are descended from one and the same common form of ancestors—in which, therefore, their common ancestry is empirically proved—there can be no doubt that they belong to one species, whether they differ much or little from one another, or whether they are almost alike or very unlike. ”

“ Failing father or husband, the unmarried daughters were placed under the guardianship of the nearest male members of the family. Thus the family, in the narrower sense in which we commonly use the word, as meaning descendants of a common father or grandfather, was, as it were, a single point of growth in a larger organism, the gens, which consisted of all those who shared a common ancestry. ”

“ The interpretation of ethnological or statistical genealogies may easily be pushed too far. Every case has to be judged upon its own merits, and due allowance must be made both for the ambition of the weaker to claim or to strengthen an alliance with the stronger, and for the not unnatural desire of clans or individuals to magnify the greatness of their ancestry. The first step must always be the careful comparison of related lists in order to test the consistency of the tradition. ”

“ The history of the race could no otherwise be communicated, or retained; but what genius could be expected in a poet by inheritance?
The nation was wholly illiterate. Neither bards nor Senachies could write or read; but if they were ignorant, there was no danger of detection; they were believed by those whose vanity they flattered.
The recital of genealogies, which has been considered as very efficacious to the preservation of a true series of ancestry, was anciently made, when the heir of the family came to manly age. ”

“ Individuals differ from their ancestors through inherited and surrounding conditions, and through the modifying powers of evolution, climate, and education. So also a pattern has, besides its ancestry and descent, the unconscious mark or seal of its day; and it is easy to trace whence it comes, if we set ourselves to examine the style of it seriously.
The patterns of which we can nearly always name at once the nationality, are the Assyrian, the Chinese, the Egyptian, the Hindu (Aryan and Turanian) , the Persian, the Archaic and the highly developed Grecian ”

“ Where each individual draws for his hereditary traits on a wide ancestry of unstable hybrids, as all civilised men do, his chances are always those of the common lot, with some slight antecedent probability of his resembling the nearer ones among his variegated ancestry. ”

“ I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering. ”

“ THE SMALL VALUE OF A FAMOUS, BUT REMOTE, ANCESTOR Fig. 41.—A living individual who was a lineal descendant of George Washington might well take pride in the fact, but genetically that fact might be of very little significance. The above chart shows graphically how small a part any single ancestor plays, a few generations back. A general high average of ability in an ancestry is much more important, eugenically, than the appearance of one or two distinguished individuals. ”

“ Strong hereditary dispositions of character may be recognized in early infancy. When the ancestry of a man is well known the roots of his recent phylogeny may be traced to his ancestors. Here we observe the effect of crossing between varieties or different races, or on the contrary that of consanguinity. ”

“ Not many of us can trace our ancestry in the direct male line to the 8th century by authentic and written documents as did a Hebrew friend of mine, thus effectually meeting the doubts of a prospective brother-in-law who asked him as to his fitness to enter a family which was able to produce a stray peer of the realm in its roll. ”

“ Pride of ancestry and love of the display of aristocratic claims developed when the hard circumstances of the former years had worn off, and we find the prominent families of the North using book-plates, and having their arms upon their coaches. ”

“ But men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several generations. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past. ”

“ Although what a man’s language really proves is not his parentage but his bringing-up, yet most children are in fact brought up by their own parents, and inherit their language as well as their features. So long as people of one race and speech live together in their own nation, their language will remain a race-mark common to all. And although migration and intermarriage, conquest and slavery interfere, from time to time, so that the native tongue of a nation can never tell the whole story of their ancestry, still it tells a part of it, and that a most important part. ”