Ancestry Quotes

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Here are 22 great quotes to get you inspired in your research. From famous authors and historians to everyday people, these quotes will remind you why you got into genealogy in the first place – because exploring your family history is fun, fascinating, and full of surprises! Whether you’re just starting out on your family history journey or you’ve been researching for years, these quotes will help motivate and encourage you. Enjoy!

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

“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.” —Michael Crichton

“We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.” —Shirley Abbott

“To forget one’s ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without roots.”  —Chinese proverb

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

“Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.” —Linda Hogan

“History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all.” —Laurence Overmire

“When our hearts turn to our ancestors, something changes inside us. We feel part of something greater than ourselves.” —Russell M. Nelson

“The sacrifice our ancestors gave yesterday gave us today and our tomorrow.” —Stephen Robert Kuta

“In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”  —Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy

“The person who has nothing to brag about but their ancestors is like a potato; the best part of them is underground.” —Sir Thomas Overbury

“We all carry inside us, people who came before us.”  —Liam Callanan

“Roots are, I’m learning, as important as wings.”  —Michele Huey

“..what the next generation will value most is not what we owned, but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we lived. In the end, it’s the family stories that are worth the storage.” —Ellen Goodman

“My family tree has many branches, both living and dead… but all equally important. I cherish the memories that make its roots run deep.” —Lynda I Fisher

“The ancestors of the mightiest tribes must have grown to prodigious proportions . . . in the end the ancestor is necessarily transfigured into a god.”  —Friedrich Nietzsche

“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.” —Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Judge not…Our ancestors made decisions about the world they lived in based on what they knew and what was normal and legal at the time. Good or bad today, those decisions might have been perfectly reasonable at that time and place.” —Mark Daly⁣

“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?” —Nellie Winslow Simmons Randall”

“We don’t own our family history. We simply preserve it for the next generation.” —Rosemary Alva

 “The more you know of your history the more liberated you are.” —Maya Angelou.

“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” —Sir Winston Churchill

Gifts for Genealogists and Family Historians

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Finding the perfect gift is never easy. And finding a gift for those genealogy lovers and family historians on your list can be especially tough when you may not know what they already have, or where their particular interests lie.

Here are a few genealogy gift ideas that will appeal to a broad range of family researchers and a broad range of budgets.

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Finding My Irish Roots – Part 8

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In this series: I am tracing my Irish roots and trying to pinpoint what part of the Emerald Isle my ancestors hailed from. Learn more here.

Where I left off: In my last post, I talked about a new DNA match who descends from Bartholomew of Bayonne and went into detail about my analysis of our shared DNA.

In the end, I was able to eliminate several lines of my family tree as possibilities of our shared ancestor, and formulate a targeted testing plan to further test my hypothesis.

In this post: Since I know that my targeted DNA testing plan will take some time to complete, I want to go back to my paper trail and answer some open questions.

The first open question I want to focus on involves Bartholomew’s oldest son and my 2x Great-Grandfather, John. I want to know what happened to John, where he died and when, and where he’s buried.

In Part 4 of this series, I talked about the many challenges I faced in my previous research attempts to find what happened to John. Read more of that background information here.

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Finding My Irish Roots – Part 7

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In this series: I am tracing my Irish roots and trying to pinpoint what part of the Emerald Isle my ancestors hailed from. Learn more here.

Where I left off: In my last post I talked about a new DNA match, “MJ”. MJ had a family tree that went back to Bartholomew of Bayonne, the person  who I suspect may be my 3x great-grandfather. I was able to independently verify her tree and show how this DNA match was related to Bartholomew.

I also talked about the possible relationships between myself, my dad, and MJ based solely on the amount of DNA we share. But just because we all share DNA and have someone in our tree named Bartholomew McDermott, doesn’t mean it’s the same Bartholomew.

Now I need to do additional analysis of the shared DNA to not fall victim to confirmation bias.

In this post: I plan to do a deep dive into the shared DNA and develop new evidence to find our common ancestor. My first step will be to eliminate as many lines in my tree as possible, then create a targeted testing plan to determine if we both descend from Bartholomew of Bayonne.

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Finding My Irish Roots – Part 6

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In this series: I am tracing my Irish roots and trying to pinpoint what part of the Emerald Isle my ancestors hailed from. Learn more here.

Where I left off: In my last post, I talked about trying to find John’s father Batholomew. While I was unsuccessful, I did find a potential candidate living in Bayonne who I refer to in this series as “Bartholomew of Bayonne.”

I concluded that the only evidence I had of this father/son relationship was a name, approximate age, and location. There was no direct evidence of this relationship, and the indirect evidence was rather weak. But before I could write off this possibility, I got a new DNA match who descended from none other than Bartholomew of Bayonne.

In this post: Now that I have this new DNA match and potential connection to Bartholomew of Bayonne, I need to independently verify the family tree of my new DNA match.

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Finding My Irish Roots – Part 5

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Bartholomew of Bayonne

In this series: I am tracing my Irish roots and trying to pinpoint what part of the Emerald Isle my ancestors hailed from. Learn more here.

Where I left off: In my last post, I talked about my struggle to find my 2x Great-Grandfather’s death certificate. I knew there was a good chance John’s mother’s maiden name and birth date would be written on the certificate.

If so, then I could compare that information to his marriage record, and ultimately confirm I had the same John that was baptized in the Kiltoghert parish of Leitrim in 1843.

In this post: Because I had hit a dead end trying to find John’s death certificate (or even his death year), I wanted to expand my search to his FAN club to Bartholomew McDermott and his wife Catherine. After all, who could be better to start with than John’s own parents?

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Finding My Irish Roots – Part 4

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In this series: I am tracing my Irish roots and trying to pinpoint what part of the Emerald Isle my ancestors hailed from. Learn more here.

Where I left off: In my last post, the third of this series, I located a baptism record for a John McDermott in the Irish parish of Kiltoghert1.

The year, location, and parents’ names were all a fairly good match, making the person a prime candidate to be my 2x great-grandfather.

However, the mother’s maiden name on the record was a different spelling and the birth year was a few years off from census records.

I needed more information and evidence to connect the person in the baptism record to the John McDermott of Newark, NJ.

In this post: With a possible baptism record for John in hand, I needed to gather more information to conclude I had the correct John. I wanted to find John’s death certificate, which would most likely list his parents’ names.

From there I’d be able to compare his mother’s maiden name to the names listed on his baptism and marriage records.

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Finding My Irish Roots – Part 3

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In this series: I am tracing my Irish roots and trying to pinpoint what part of the Emerald Isle my ancestors hailed from. Learn more here.

Where I left off: In my last post, the second in this series, I walked through the process of finding John and Annie’s original marriage record in order to determine the names of John’s parents.

I concluded that their names were likely Bartholomew McDermott and Catherine Gahan and that John was likely born in County Leitrim ca. 1844.

In this post: Now that I know the likely names of John’s parents and the approximate year and county of this birth, I want to find John’s baptism record in Ireland.

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Finding My Irish Roots – Part 2

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This is the second post in my series on finding my Irish roots. In the first post, I briefly introduced this blog series and talked about my goal of finding exactly where in Ireland my ancestors lived before coming to America.

With my goal defined, this post will provide some of the background information, create an initial research question, and lay out some initial steps for my research.

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Finding My Irish Roots – Part 1

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Tracing my Irish Ancestors Back to the Emerald Isle

One of the biggest challenges in my family tree has been pinpointing where exactly in Ireland my ancestors lived. It’s one of those unknowns that I’ve been trying to nail down for a while.

If you have Irish ancestors who came to America (particularly around the time of the Great Famine), you know just how hard it is to research.

With so many of Ireland’s civil records destroyed in the fire of 1922, we have to rely mostly on parish records and Griffiths Valuation (1848-18641) for our mid-nineteenth century research.

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