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Family History Quotes

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Family History Quotes

“Yes, American history is complicated and hard. All history is complicated and hard. Human life, past and present, is never simple. Every family history is checkered, to some extent, and with great inheritances come humbling challenges. But I believe Americans are brave enough to face those challenges, to overcome adversity, celebrate our triumphs---to be a teachable people who learns from our history and goes confidently into the future with, as Lincoln said, "malice toward none and charity for all.”

HistoryHuman LifeAmerican HistoryAmericansFamily History
Book:Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland
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“She walks the same paths where her father walked, and her grandfather, and her great-grandfather before her. She passes by familiar trees, the towering silent witnesses to over two centuries of history. Many of these majestic woodland giants, like faithful old friends, proudly bear the telltale tap-marks, remnants of a multi-generational maple harvest.”

Family HistoryCountry LifeFarm LifeMaple SyrupMaple TreesMaple Harvest
Book:Lanark County Kitchen: A Maple Legacy from Tree to Table
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“When I asked Grandma about it she told me in her own way . . .she wanted me to know that each time I looked at my quilt it would remind me to be compassionate with other and identify with their struggles. I remember her exact words, same ones she repeated so many times: "Chile, Grandma never wants you to look at the bad in folks and go backwards. I wants you to look at the good in them and go forward. If you jest look at the bad you gonna fine zactly what you lookin' for. Even the worse folks got a speck of good, you jest gotta fine it.”

MemoriesFabricFamily LoveFamily HistorySlavesQuilts
Book:Quilt of Souls: A Memoir
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“We know that now. Vehicles of transportation include, according to the scholar of memory studies Marianne Hirsch, "narratives, actions and symptoms." The stories we tell and don't tell, the actions we take and don't take, the symptoms expressed by a mother holding the trauma tightly to herself, because she refused to burden her children with it.”

MemoryStorytellingFamily HistorySilencingHealing TraumaGenerational TraumaIrish HistoryUnburdeningBiological Trauma
Book:In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History
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“But guilt at the missing details hampered my ability to remember, forced me to put off asking more detailed questions. It was already clear that I would one day (when I became that better version of myself) open a special notebook and sit down with my mother, and she would start at the very beginning, and then there would be some meaning to it all – and a system, a family tree, and every cousin and nephew would be in their rightful place, and at the end of it there would be a book.”

MemoryFamily History
Book:In Memory of Memory
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“My blissful childhood was shattered without warning when I was about ten years old. One day, my father told me that he had spent seventeen years of his life in prisons, Gulag labor camps, and internal exile. At that moment, his confession became the greatest shock I had ever experienced. “My father — the kindest and wisest man on earth — and suddenly this?” I refused to believe my own ears. But my dad did not stop at the bare fact. He spoke of hunger, of cruelty, of utter powerlessness — and of his own horrific existence within a totalitarian, inhuman system. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One. Author's Preface Context note: This passage comes from the author’s preface and reflects a real childhood revelation that became the moral and emotional foundation of the novel. Learning that his father had survived years of prisons, labor camps, and exile under the Soviet totalitarian system, the author transformed personal memory into a literary quest to understand repression, trauma, and human endurance.”

MemoirSoviet UnionChildhood MemoriesFamily HistoryGenerational TraumaGulagPolitical RepressionAutobiographical FictionHistorical TraumaMoralawakening
Book:Камень. Биографический роман: Часть первая. Первые шаги к свету и обратно
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“History is often told through grand events and famous names. I wanted to tell a story about the people who rarely make the headlines—the ones who got up every day, did the work in front of them, and quietly moved the world forward one field, one family, one small-town decision at a time.”

Historical FictionFamily HistoryWesterns19th Century America
Book:The Ordinary Grit: Courage Under an Unforgiving Sky
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“There was something about the people you grew up around, the ones you'd seen throughout your childhood, the folks you couldn't remember not knowing. Even if the past was a complicated mess, as you aged, you were just glad the sons of bitches were still on the planet. It gave you the illusion that life wasn't as fragile as it actually was--and on occasion, that was the only thing that got you through the night.”

FamilySiblingsFamily History
Book:Lover at Last
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“I saw behind me those who had gone, and before me, those who are to come. I looked back and saw my father, and his father, and all our fathers, and in front, to see my son, and his son, and the sons upon sons beyond. And their eyes were my eyes. As I felt, so they had felt, and were to feel, as then, so now, as tomorrow and forever. Then I was not afraid, for I was in a long line that had no beginning, and no end, and the hand of his father grasped my father's hand, and his hand was in mine, and my unborn son took my right hand, and all, up and down the line stretched from Time That Was, to Time That Is, and is not yet, raised their hands to show the link, and we found that we were one, born of Woman, Son of Man, had in the Image, fashioned in the Womb by the Will of God, the eternal Father. I was one of them, they were of me, and in me, and I in all of them.”

TimeForefathersFamily HistoryLineageGeneologyFamily LineFamily Forever
Book:HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY
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“Stories weren't just make believe, all Dr. Seuss and Mother Goose. I saw a circle: first life, then death. Spring, summer, fall, winter. Blue sky and storms and quilts of cold clouds occupy the same space but at different times. Memories and stories help you rebuild. Things most precious to you may be gone, lost to the wicked wind, but you remember what had been, and you move on.”

StoriesMemoriesStorytellingFamily History
Book:We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger's Daughter
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“And soon all the people who had accompanied me through life would be gone, too, and then even the people who had known us, and no one would remain on earth who had ever seen us, and those descended from us perhaps would know stories about us, perhaps once in a while they would pass by buildings where where we had lived and they would mention that we had lived there. And then the stories would fade, and our graves would go untended, and no one would guess what it had been like to wake before dawn in our breath-warmed bedrooms as the radiators clanked and our wives and husbands and children slept. And we would move from the nearer regions of the dead who are remembered into the farther regions of he forgotten, an on past those, into a space as while and big as the sky replicated forever.”

Family History
Author:Ian Frazier
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“My dad takes most of the pictures in our family, and he makes scrapbooks. This means he gets to figure out what's important for us to remember... I guess my mom could make a scrapbook, but she doesn't. And I could do it and so could my brothers, but then we would need extra pictures. Plus we're just kids and we don't have time for that. I know the scrapbooks we'd make would be different from Dad's. But the person who does the work gets to write the history.”

Family HistoryScrapbookingFamily Photos
Book:Short
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“The values and assumptions of that household I took in without knowing when or how it happened, and I have them to this day: The pleasure in sharing pleasure. The belief that is is only proper to help lame dogs to get over stiles and young men to put one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. An impatient disregard for small sums of money. The belief that it is a sin against Nature to put sugar in one's tea. The preference for being home over being anywhere else. The belief that generous impulses should be acted on, whether you can afford to do this or not. The trust in premonitions and the knowledge of what is in wrapped packages. The willingness to go to any amount of trouble to make yourself comfortable. The tendency to take refuge in absolutes. The belief that you don't have to apologize for tears; that consoling words should never be withheld; that what somebody wants very much they should, if possible, have.”

Family HistoryAssumptions
Book:ANCESTORS: A Family History
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“Telling our personal story constitutes an act of consciousness that defines the ethical lining of a person’s constitution. Recounting personal stories promotes personal growth, spurs the performance of selfless deeds, and in doing so enhances the ability of the equitable eye of humanity to scroll rearward and forward. Every person must become familiar with our communal history of struggle, loss, redemption, and meaningfully contemplate the meaning behind our personal existence in order to draft a proper and prosperous future for succeeding generations. Accordingly, every person is responsible for sharing their story using the language of thought that best expresses their sanguine reminiscences. Without a record of pastimes, we will never know what were, what we now are, or what we might become by steadfastly and honorably struggling with mortal chores.”

PastMemoirAutobiographyRemembranceMemoir WritingRememberingReflectionsPastimeFamily HistoryPersonal HistoryNarrative WritingReflections On LifeReflecting On Yourself
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Pursuing a family history beyond a simple catalogue of names is always evidence of separation, of severing ties at least to the extent of holding one’s relations at arm’s length. The family member who want to make a private gift of a family tree to a close circle of relatives soon becomes the historian who estranges her antecedents by locating them “in history”. I found that family history, which humanizes those who might otherwise be mere faces in a crowd, also defamiliarized those closest to me, giving their lives a larger pattern than they had when they were lived. They became both more and less themselves. I consoled myself by thinking that this is what history does to us too. As we grow older we see not how unique our lives have been, but how representative we were and are; that we are part of the figure in the carpet woven by events, by chance and accident, and by the play of forces more powerful than us.”

Family HistoryGenealogy
Book:Common People: The History of An English Family
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“My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.”

ChildrenFactsStoriesMotherFictionStepsShareAdultsComplicatedDivorceUsualAttemptingLife StoryFamily HistoryDysfunctionObfuscationStep Children
Author:Melissa Gilbert
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“There is no doubt of the essential nobility of that man who pours into life the honest vigor of his toil, over those who compose the feathery foam of fashion that sweeps along Broadway; who consider the insignia of honor to consist in wealth and indolence; and who, ignoring the family history, paint coats of arms to cover up the leather aprons of their grandfathers.”

MenWealthDoubtHonestFashionArmsHonorEssentialsLaborPaintNo DoubtGrandfatherCoatsToilBroadwayNobilityLeatherVigorFamily HistoryIndolenceCover UpsFoamApronsCoat Of Arms
Author:Edwin Hubbel Chapin
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“In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.”

InspirationalPastFamilyFutureMy FamilyMeaningfulAfrican AmericanBridgesOur FamilyLinksOur FutureOur PastAlexFamily LoveAbout FamilyFamily HistoryHappy FamilyInspirational Family LoveGreat FamilyBest FamilyInspirational FamilyFamily ReunionFunny FamilyFunny Family ReunionLike FamilyFamily TogethernessCute FamilyAmazing FamilyFamily GatheringSpiritual Family
Author:Alex Haley
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