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Ancestry   /ˈænsɛstri/   Listen
Ancestry

noun
1.
The descendants of one individual.  Synonyms: blood, blood line, bloodline, descent, line, line of descent, lineage, origin, parentage, pedigree, stemma, stock.
2.
Inherited properties shared with others of your bloodline.  Synonyms: derivation, filiation, lineage.






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"Ancestry" Quotes from Famous Books



... the things which he had heard and half heeded about Conroy's ancestry. In 1850 another Conroy, a broken peasant, the victim of evil fate and gross injustice, had left Ireland in an emigrant ship with a ragged wife and four half starved children clinging to him, with an unquenchable hatred of England ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham

... In truth, to luck I care not to pretend, For 'twas not luck that mark'd me for your friend: Virgil at first, that faithful heart and true, And Varius after, named my name to you. Brought to your presence, stammeringly I told (For modesty forbade me to be bold) No vaunting tale of ancestry of pride, Of good broad acres and sleek nags to ride, But simple truth: a few brief words you say, As is your wont, and wish me a good day. Then, nine months after, graciously you send, Desire my company, and hail me friend. O, 'tis no common fortune, when one earns A friend's regard, who ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... Hubert De Burgh, whose ancestry is unknown with certainty (though some genealogists attempt to derive him from Herlouin de Conteville, and his wife Arlette, mother of William the Conqueror), was probably born about 1168-70, and created ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt

... born April 2, 1884, at Plymouth, of Devonian ancestry. He was educated at Blundell's and Cambridge University, and became known first as a remarkably adroit parodist. His Imaginary Speeches (1912) and Tricks of the Trade (1917) are amusing parodies and, what is more, excellent criticism. He ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various

... plot was unquestionably Robert Catesby, of Ashby Saint Ledgers, a Northamptonshire gentleman of ancient ancestry and fair estate. He first whispered it in secret to John Wright, a Lincolnshire squire, and soon afterwards to Thomas Winter, a younger brother of the owner of Huddington Hall in Worcestershire, and a distant cousin of an old friend of some of ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt

... generation of a picked and mixed ancestry. The merry, the adventurous, often the desperate, always the brave, deserted the South and New England in 1849 to rush around the Horn or to try the perils of the plains. They found there a land already grown ...
— The City That Was - A Requiem of Old San Francisco • Will Irwin

... reflected lights on the boy's skin, the texture of which was darker than that of a mulatto, and had a dead, opaque look, lacking the golden glow of mulatto skin. The lad's hair showed little hint of Bantu ancestry and his feet were small. True, all this might betoken any of the Creole combinations common in Haiti, but the Cuban was not satisfied. If the skin ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... of the following narrative was a French refugee, who entered the service of William of Orange. To find the beginning of his ancestry, we must reach far back into history. The Rapins were supposed to have been driven from the Campagna of Rome during the persecutions of Nero. They took refuge in one of the wildest and most picturesque valleys of the Alps. In 1250 we find the Rapins established near Saint-Jean ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles

... during slavery. The housemaids, coachmen, body-servants and, in many cases, the cooks came in direct contact with the civilization of the "Great House," and their superiority, and, in many cases, that of their ancestry, is still apparent. The "corn field Negro" (and they outnumbered the others 200 to 1) received none of the influences of this civilization, and none of the opportunities accorded the more favored servants around ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... grandfather Susan B., ancestry, marriage, military service, 4; political record, religious belief, 5; literary taste, business matters, 6; sideboard well supplied, 15; military rec. makes A. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... some old manuscripts the other day the editor came across the following letter which is so full of longing for the country of the writer's ancestry that we publish it herewith, just as ...
— Cape Cod and All the Pilgrim Land, June 1922, Volume 6, Number 4 • Various

... ancestry. An' remember, God loves the Irish—Kwaque! Go fetch 'm two bottle beer fella stop 'm along icey-chestis!—Why, the very mug of you, my lad, sticks out Irish all over it." (Michael's tail beat a tattoo.) "Now don't be blarneyin' me. 'Tis well I'm wise to your insidyous, snugglin', ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London

... Italians. It may be deemed strange that any other result should be thought possible, since the very earth around them, with all it bears, is so vivified with the spirit of Heroism, of Genius, and of whatever is most memorable in History. But the legitimate influences of Nature, of Art, and of Ancestry, are often overborne by those of Institutions and Laws, as is now witnessed on all the eastern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean, and I was rather disappointed in finding the present Romans a race ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... betrayal of man by man—to bribery. It was not of much use for the pulpit to point it out. Men adopted bribery as a means to business activity. It was of no use to recall the brilliant moments of character in history, men would not read them. Their ancestry was a back number, the deeds of their ancestors mere old-fashioned narrowness of business. What if a member of the American Congress, Joseph Reed, during the American Revolution did refuse the 10,000 guineas offered by the foreign ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage

... at first, put himself and his private funds at Jude's disposal. He had had hopes that by so doing he might help Jude to decent manliness. But that hope soon died. Jude, lazy with the inertness of a too sharply defined ancestry, became ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock

... applaud the concluding passage, which Colonel Talmadge rendered with resounding majesty. I was as ready as any of them to pledge my life, fortune, and sacred honor for such a cause. The heroic element was strong in me, having come down by ordinary generation from a long line of Puritan ancestry, and just now it made me long to do something, I knew not what: to fight for my country, or to make some declaration on my ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... people's experiences—and surely the information thus gained cannot properly be termed knowledge—but from the sensations I myself, as a member of an old Irish clan, have experienced from the hauntings of the banshee—the banshee that down through the long links of my Celtic ancestry, through all vicissitudes, through all changes of fortune, has followed us, and will follow us, to the end of time. Because it is customary to speak of an Irish family ghost by its generic title, the ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... New Cratylus, B. I. Chap. 4. Latham's dogmatic skepticism will hardly shake the now established faith on this subject. The science of ethnography was unknown to the ancients. Tacitus had not the remotest idea, that all mankind were sprung from a common ancestry, and diffused themselves over the world from a common centre, a fact asserted in the Scriptures, and daily receiving fresh confirmation from literature and science. Hence he speaks of the Germans as indigenas, which he explains below by editum terra, sprung from ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus

... not confer them. He would rather be Mr. *** (Mr. *** was present) than a prince of the blood. He panted to distinguish himself by qualities that were properly his own, and had little veneration for the false varnish of ancestry. Were that of any worth, he had as much reason to be vain as any man perhaps in the kingdom: his family came in with the Conqueror, at which time it was respectable: it had produced men, through all its branches, whose ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... remotely related to man as the cat has many more resemblances to man in anatomical structure than dissimilarities. Now, the meaning of these anatomical homologies, biologists say, is that these animals are genetically related, that is, they had a common ancestry at some remote ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... in the mail stage and had a most delightful trip. Mr. David Bruce, a well-known solicitor of Scottish ancestry, and his sister happened to be passengers. It was my first excursion, and my first glimpse of the country. The hotel at Greensburg was the first public house in which I had ever taken a meal. I thought the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie

... which no person can entertain who is familiar with the laws of comparative philology, and with the general theory of the human intellect." To one who remembers that every nation of the Indo-European race traces its descent from a barbarous ancestry, and especially that the Germans in the days of Tacitus were in precisely the same social stage as that of the Iroquois in the days of Champlain, this opinion of the brilliant French philologist and historian will seem erratic and unaccountable. M. Cuoq sought to refute it, not merely ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale

... the advice of Francis Bacon, we refuse inter mortuos quaerere vivum; we leave the past to bury its dead, and ignore our intellectual ancestry. Nor are we content with that. We follow the evil example set us, not only by Bacon but by almost all the men of the Renaissance, in pouring scorn upon the work of our immediate spiritual forefathers, the schoolmen of the Middle Ages. It is accepted as a truth which is indisputable, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... anything—walk-on, extra, chorus. Lyddy, she called her. The girl seldom spoke. She was extremely stupid, but a marvellous mimic, and pretty beyond belief; fragile, and yet with something common about her even in her fragility. Her wrists had a certain flat angularity that bespoke a peasant ancestry, but she had a singular freshness and youthful bloom. The line of her side face from the eye socket to the chin was a delicious thing that curved with the grace of a wing. The high cheekbone sloped down so that the outline was heart-shaped. There were little indentations ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber

... Unreliable as these traditions may be taken singly, they nevertheless agree in placing the conversion of Ireland at a very early date, probably, as Geoghegan says, in the fourth century. It is certain that about the middle of the sixth century an Irish prince of distinguished ancestry, and himself a saint, led a band of missionaries from Donegal to Iona. It is curious to observe that the event is almost contemporary with the renovations of Justinian at Byzantium, and only a short time before the founding of the famous Abbey of Monte Cassino by ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley

... that bade him to their board; His fortunes now were over, and the sword Of his proud ancestry dishonour'd—left To moulder in ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart

... Aztecan houses were flat or terrace-topped. Examples yet exist in Northern and New Mexico, in the towns of the Pecos Zunis, and Moquis. It is but natural, therefore, that the people who now call themselves Mexicans should have followed a pattern thus furnished them by their ancestry in both hemispheres. ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid

... at the Blackstone Hotel, which is just next door to the Blackstone Theatre, as any one is aware who knows Chicago. She was advertised as the Polish comedienne, Mizzi Markis, and the announcements hinted at her royal though remote ancestry. And on the night the play opened, as Mizzi stepped from the entrance of her hotel on her way to the stage door, just forty or fifty feet away, there she saw stretched on the pavement a scarlet path of soft-grained carpet for her feet to tread. From the steps of the hotel ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber

... my father and mother will be living there too, whatever." He was not to be outdone by her in the matter of ancestry. ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith

... dwellers on the soil are a strange mixture of the Mediterranean race; and as it is impossible to describe them, or say what they are, we will just be content with the title they are proudest of—the reptilian one of "rock scorpions"—a tough, hardy people, though, notwithstanding their doubtful ancestry. ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith

... marriage. Father, mother and sister had objected to her from the beginning, not because she was unworthy, but because her tradespeople ancestry was not so remote as his. She found a curious sense of pleasure in returning to them the thing they prized so highly and surrendered to her with such bitterness of heart. She had not been good enough for him: ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon

... the type. Let us turn next to the story of Whitman's life. It must here be told in the briefest fashion, for Whitman's own prose and poetry relate the essentials of his biography. He was born on Long Island, of New England and Dutch ancestry, in 1819. Lowell, W. W. Story, and Charles A. Dana were born in that year, as was also George Eliot. Whitman's father was a carpenter, who "leaned to the Quakers." There were many children. When little "Walt"—as he was called, to distinguish him from his father, Walter—was four, the family moved ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... savant studies long and investigates much before he gives a positive classification of a piece that is not "pedigreed." Here is a Flemish piece, here is a French, he will declare, and for the life of you you cannot see the ear-marks that tell the ancestry. And so in all humility you ask, "How can you tell with a glance of the eye?" But he does not. No one can do that in every case. He must spend days at it, reflecting, reading, handling, if the piece is evidently one of value. He will show you, perhaps, as an honest dealer-collector ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... of them as are in business, or have won their way to any position among men no doubt are there, I suppose," answered Robinette straightforwardly. "I think we just guess at people's ancestry by the way they look, act, and speak," she continued musingly. "You can 'guess' quite well if you are clever at it. No Indians or Chinese ever dine with me, Miss Smeardon, though I'd rather like a peaceful Indian ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... the men of Massachusetts, who settled on the River St. John, deprived New England of some of the more enterprising of its people. An indication of the Puritan ancestry of these immigrants who settled on the St. John river is furnished by the Biblical names of a very large majority of the original grantees of Maugerville.[124] Among these names we find the following:—Enoch, ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond

... consulted her friend De Segur, who also consulted his bonne amie, Madame de Montbrune. This lady determined that if Bonaparte and his wife were desirous to be served, or waited on, by persons above them by ancestry and honour, they should pay liberally for such sacrifices. She was not therefore idle, but wishing to profit herself by the pride of upstart vanity, she had at first merely reconnoitred the ground, or made distant overtures to those families of the ancient French ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... his wit in the oddities and mishaps of English middle-class domestic life, but in the contrasts and incongruities of a Boston boarding-house. He informs us at the outset that he much prefers a family with an ancestry— one that has had a judge or a governor in it, with old family portraits, old books and claw-footed furniture; but if Doctor Holmes had depended on such society for his material he would hardly have interested ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns

... establishing rights by prescriptive use, however tortuous in their origin they may have been. You would deem a man insane, whose keen sense of equity would lead him to denounce your right to the lands you hold, and which perhaps you inherited from a long line of ancestry, because your title was derived from a Saxon or Norman conqueror, and your lands were originally wrested by violence from the vanquished Britons. And so would the New England abolitionists regard any one who would insist that he should restore his farm to the descendants ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... which new variations may arise and which is more easily understood. It is the method of double parentage. The Barred Plymouth Rock chicken had its origin in such a double ancestry. The one parent was a Black Java whose color has disappeared entirely in the cross, but whose single comb with its few large points comes out clearly in the newly produced fowl. The other parent was a Barred Dominique. It is to ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker

... retained from their remote ancestry, I cannot tell, but any kind of suffering will wake in some a masterful impulse to burrow; and as the boys walked about in their misery, white with cold and hunger, Clare's eyes kept turning to every shallowest archway, every breach in wall or hedge that seemed to ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald

... between them, and they are utterly unfit to be mated. There might be impotency, or barrenness, or the progeny, if any, would be decidedly inferior to the parents; and the same applies, more or less, to other relatives descended from a common ancestry, but more distant than brother and sister. Mr. Walker also holds that where the parents are not only of the same variety but of the same family in the narrowest sense, the female always gives the locomotive system and the father the nutritive; in which ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale

... Doubtless these sans culottes swell in their dangling rags with the haughty consciousness that they possess white skins. What proud reflections they must have, as they pursue their barefoot way, thinking on their high lineage, and running back through the long list of their illustrious ancestry whose notable badge was a white skin! No wonder they cannot stop to bow to the passing stranger. These sprouts of the Caucasian race are known among the Barbadians by the rather ungracious name ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... Ancestry, opportunity and events all conspired to equip Charles Sumner with those implements that make man great. Like Phillips, he was a descendant of the early settlers of Boston. His father led the men who delivered Garrison out of the ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis

... the faithful Huguenot preacher imagine that a century after he wrote thus kindly to his own children, myriads who have been born from the same noble and holy ancestry would be animated, cheered, and profited by his useful life and example. Though ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... Ancestry.—We take rank by descent. Such of us as have the longest pedigree, and are therefore the furthest removed from the first who made the fortune and founded the family, we are the noblest. The nearer to the fountain the fouler the stream: ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... father had no particular interest in tracing his early ancestry. "My own genealogical inquiries," he said, "have taken me so far back that I confess the later stages do not interest me." Towards the end of his life, however, my mother persuaded him to see what could be found out about Huxley Hall and the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... the last curve between it and the line of battle. The smell of burning powder that filled the air, the sight of flowing blood, the shouts of teh fighting men, had awakened every bosom that deep-lying KILLING instinct inherited from our savage ancestry, which slumbers—generally wholly unsuspected—in even the gentlest man's bosom, until some accident gives ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy

... (Merina and related Betsileo), Cotiers (mixed African, Malayo-Indonesian, and Arab ancestry - Betsimisaraka, Tsimihety, Antaisaka, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... into his sensitive imagination, and then filled in the surface with his own profound dramatic emanations. But in his subtle and strong moral insight, his insatiable passion for truth, he surely represented his Puritan ancestry in the most worthy and obviously sympathetic way. No New-Englander, moreover, with any depth of feeling in him, can be entirely wanting in reverence for the nobler traits of his stern forefathers, or in some sort of love for the whole ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... the key to all biological thinking of today. It is not a theory but a fact, because the main facts are true. Man is the off-spring of the lower animals, and the ancestry can be traced back to the simplest forms of animals known. All medical research ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant

... origin, entirely independent from the origin of the Negritos, was Malayan. Here the Ilocanes, or the natives of the better class, the Christians of these provinces, although of Malay origin, belong to a more cultured class of Malay ancestry. They are amenable to Christian influences, and their manners are agreeable and pleasing. They cultivate abundant quantities of sugar, cotton, indigo, rice, and tobacco, and the women weave the famous Ilocano blankets that are sold at ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert

... our father and our mother? Or can we point to any Romulus and Remus for our founders? Our ancestry is lost in the universal paternity; and Caesar and Alfred, St. Paul and Luther, and Homer and Shakespeare are as much ours as Washington, who is as much the world's as our own. We are the heirs of all time, and with all nations we divide our inheritance. On this Western ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... they are indisputable, though history is silent about them. I suppose, on this score, we ought to deny that the round towers of this country had any origin, because history does not disclose it; or that any individual came from Adam who cannot produce the table of his ancestry. Yet Gibbon argues against the darkness at the Passion, from the accident that it is not mentioned by Pagan historians:—as well might he argue against the existence of Christianity itself in the first century, because Seneca, Pliny, Plutarch, the Jewish Mishna, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... at her with admiration in his eyes. Helen was worthy of inspection. Her thin summer dress, with the cluster of crimson roses tucked into the waist of it, brought out her rich beauty which betokened a Latin ancestry. ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss

... wonderful and very precious gift was bestowed upon her, namely another human life to love and live for.—Bestowed on her, moreover, without asking or choice of her own, arbitrarily, through the claim of his and her common ancestry and the profound moral and spiritual obligations, the mysterious affinities, which ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... Introduction Chapter I. Ancestry and Boyhood Chapter II. College Days Chapter III. A Confederate Soldier Chapter IV. Seeking a Vocation Chapter V. Lawyer and Traveler Chapter VI. A Musician in Baltimore Chapter VII. The Beginning of a Literary Career Chapter ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... represented in the great Puritan exodus, the East Anglian counties contributed to it far more than all the rest. Perhaps it would not be far out of the way to say that two-thirds of the American people who can trace their ancestry to New England might follow it back to the East Anglian shires of the mother-country; one-sixth might follow it to those southwestern countries—Devonshire, Dorset, and Somerset—which so long were foremost in maritime enterprise; one-sixth ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske

... but there is hotter blood in my veins than in yours. My father was English—though you might scarcely suppose it—but my mother, to whose name I have reverted, was a French Creole. So perhaps my natural instincts come nearer to those of our savage ancestry than do yours. Whether or not you will understand me I do not know, but I can tell you that even now, in cold blood—for my paroxysm has exhausted itself and me—it seems to me that it would be my duty, not to say my ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison

... Stripes were unfolded in a breeze of hot words that betrayed the consul's belief in the prepose's sinister ancestry and in eternal punishment. No entente cordiale could ever be cemented after that ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... fly, or yield To thee my quarters, though a child I be; My life shalt thou take from me, if my shield; But I, in God, well hope the contrary. — This as it may! — shall none, in fighting field, Say that I ever shamed my ancestry." So said, and grasping in his hand the sword, The youthful king assailed ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... the true dependence of children on parents. We have a glib phrase about "the accident of birth," but it would puzzle anybody to tell what it means. If A takes B to wife, it is not an accident that he took B rather than C, D, or any other woman; and if A and B have a child, X, that child's ties to ancestry and posterity, and his relations to the human race, into which he has been born through A and B, are in no sense accidental. The child's interest in the question whether A should have married B or C is as ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner

... intention, because of his calfskin binding, quite old and worn. A decayed Gibbon, I had thought, proclaims a grandfather. A set of British Essayists, if disordered, takes you back of the black walnut. To what length, then, of cultured ancestry must not this Bell give evidence? (I had bought Bell, secondhand, on Farringdon Road, London, from a cart, cheap, because ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks

... tidy and serene,—that the very air seemed clearer there than in the open street. The humble furniture, good of its kind, was all shiny with "elbow grease," and some parts of it looked quaint and well-preserved, like the heirlooms of a careful cottage ancestry. The well polished fire-irons, and other metal things, seemed to gather up the diffuse daylight and fling it back in concentrated radiances that illuminated the shady cottage with cheerful beauty. The little shelf of books, the gleaming ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh

... coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less force and solidity, than her own. The women who were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Foss, of Massachusetts, had luncheon with a prominent Englishman noted for boasting of his ancestry. Taking a coin from his pocket, the Englishman said: "My great-great-grandfather was made a lord by the king whose picture you see on this shilling." "Indeed!" replied the governor, smiling, as he produced another coin. "What a coincidence! My great-great-grandfather ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... in his face, I saw that his features were not painted; that they were delicate and regular, and that the skin was pale, betraying his French ancestry. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... disuse gradually producing an obliteration of this tissue in some cases, and the modifying influence of evolution producing it in others; the climbing muscle, probably the oldest remnant and legacy that has descended from our long-haired and muscular ancestry, is the best example of disappearance caused by disuse, while the effectual disappearance of the prepuce in many cases shows that in that regard there exists a marked difference in the evolutionary march among ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... his illustrious parent, concludes with remarking, that, after all, a noble descent would confer less lustre on him than to have sprung from such a father; a philosophical sentiment, indicating pretty strongly that he had no great ancestry to boast of. Ferdinand finds something extremely mysterious and typical in his father's name of Columbus, signifying a dove, in token of his being ordained to "carry the olive-branch and oil of baptism over the ocean, like Noah's dove, to denote the peace and union of the heathen ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott

... principles of universal freedom? Read Bancroft, read Goodrich, read Frost, read every Protestant historian of our country, and you will see there inscribed, on the historic page, a fact which reflects immortal honor on our American Catholic ancestry—that Lord Baltimore and his Catholic colonists of Maryland were the first to proclaim universal liberty, civil and religious; the first to announce, as the basis of their legislation, the great and noble principle that no man's faith and conscience should be a bar to his holding ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller

... end of Ritterdom in Plassenburg, I noted that there was a gathering of the hooded folk—the carrion crows. And lo! there before me, already comfortably a-swing, were our late foes, the two bravoes, and in the middle the dead Cannstadt tucked up beside them, for all his five hundred years of ancestry—stamped traitor and coward by the Miller's Son, who minded none of these things, but understood a true man when ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... Matt called upon MacCandless, the general manager of the Oriental Steamship Company. Mr. MacCandless was a cold individual of Scotch ancestry, with a scent for a dollar a trifle keener than most; and Matt Peasley, young and inexperienced in business fencing, was never more aware of his deficiencies than when he faced MacCandless across the latter's desk. Consequently, he resolved to waste no words in vain parley. MacCandless ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne

... strong on ancestry out West," he rubbed his whiskerless chin. "It goes back too often to—" he looked up quietly at MacDonald, "to bow and arrow aristocracy, scalps, in fact; but as for myself," if a little oily, still the smile ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... feel as it was coming, dawned fully upon me, or I should rather say struck me, so sharp and sudden was the shock I experienced. If there was anything in which I was secure and of which I had reason to be proud, it was my Puritan and English ancestry. As the blood flew to my youthful face in instinctive protest and indignation, my appearance must have been a sufficient answer to my interrogator; for I remember that he, at once springing to his feet, offered me his hand, making ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various

... once, that Lucius Opimius, then Consul, should see THAT THE REPUBLIC TOOK NO HARM; not one night intervened. Caius Gracchus was slain on mere suspicions of sedition, the son of a most noble father, most noble grandfather, most noble ancestry. Marcus Fulvius, a consular, was slain with both his children. By a like decree of the Senate, the charge of the republic was committed to Caius Marius and Lucius Valerius, the Consuls—did the republic's vengeance delay ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... 18 feet in length. In those days physical strength carried almost everything, while intelligence frequently counted nothing. Looking at those mailed figures makes one almost feel ashamed of his ancestry. Besides one of the blocks upor which were beheaded both the innocent and the guilty in former times, there are also on exhibition the Collar of Torture, 14 pounds in weight, the Thumb-screw, the Stocks, &c., a collection of instruments of torture well calculated to restore in the mind ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner

... assented Amidon, rather stupidly, but he was not to be abashed with the other man's metaphysics. Rosenstein did credit to his German ancestry at times, and was then in deep waters ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... expression, Nevis and Bath House were in an uproar. The unforeseen engagement following on the heels of the famous poet's transformation, the haughty departure of Mrs. Nunn, and the manifest approval of Lady Hunsdon and Lady Constance, who called assiduously at The Grange, the distinguished ancestry and appearance of Miss Percy, and the fact that the wedding was to take place on the island instead of in London, combined to make a sensation such as Nevis had not known since the marriage of Nelson and Mrs. Nisbet in 1787. Strange memories ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton

... professor of the old school, stern, and at examination a terror to the candidates. Clad in cap and gown, he would reject his own son. Nothing will serve. Recommendations defeat their object. An unquestioned Roumanian ancestry, an extraction indisputably Japanese, find no more favor in his eyes than an assumed stammer, a sham deafness, or a convalescent pallor put on for the occasion. East and west are alike in his sight. The retired registrar, the pensioned ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... Penhallow was always the signal for a gathering of the Penhallows. From the uttermost parts of the earth they would come—Penhallows by birth, and Penhallows by marriage and Penhallows by ancestry. East Grafton was the ancient habitat of the race, and Penhallow Grange, where "old" John Penhallow lived, was ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... first heard of that doctrine I did not like it. My heart was filled with sympathy for those people who have nothing to be proud of except ancestors. I thought, how terrible this will be upon the nobility of the old world. Think of their being forced to trace their ancestry back to the duke Orang Outang, or to the princess Chimpanzee. After thinking it all over, I came to the conclusion that I liked that doctrine. I became convinced in spite of myself. I read about rudimentary bones and muscles. I was told that everybody had rudimentary muscles extending from the ear ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll

... Swedes have no fear that his love of truth and justice will not outweigh this deficiency and probably make him a more practical ruler. As for the French descent of the Swedish royal house, neither the present nor the late king have ever been ashamed of their ancestry, or forgotten that the first Bernadotte on their throne was ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough

... are generally opulent and respectable, and hold no community with the others. They use a different liturgy, and their language is even different. They never intermarry with the Jews of the Dutch Synagogue. They pride themselves on their ancestry, and give their children the best education which can be obtained where they reside. The Brokers upon the Exchange, of the Jewish persuasion, are all or chiefly of the Portuguese Synagogue. Their number is limited to twelve by Act of Parliament, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... he came of a hardy agricultural stock,[1] improved by a graft from that highly-cultured tree, Rose of Kilravock.[2] Through his mother, a somewhat prosaic person herself, he inherited strains from Huguenot and Highland ancestry. There were recognisable traces of all these elements in Henry Yule, and as was well said by one of his oldest friends: "He was one of those curious racial compounds one finds on the east side of Scotland, in whom the hard Teutonic grit is sweetened by ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... beards and gleaming eyes. There were many famous sea rovers, but none more celebrated than Capt. Kidd. Paul Jones Garry inherits a document which locates a considerable treasure buried by two of Kidd's crew. The hero of this book is an ambitious, persevering lad, of salt-water New England ancestry, and his efforts to reach the island and secure the money form one of the most absorbing tales for our youth that has come ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis

... and risked yourselves, he remained here and tampered with the laws of Solon. Because he has spent his money, and many, many contributions? But he never gave you anything, but took much of your revenue. 27. On account of his ancestry? For some formerly were pardoned by you on this account. But this man should die on his own account, and be sold as a slave on theirs. But that he will pay you if you spare him? He who has no remembrance of your former favors to him. For from a slave he became ...
— The Orations of Lysias • Lysias

... self-supporting woman in Honolulu trace their ancestry back to Kamehameha with great pride. The chant is a weird sing-song which relates the conquests ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... boy's voice from the fur, in the language of his mother, who added a strain of Indian blood to her French ancestry. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... and it should teach us charity. Not as much can be expected of Billy Castant, coming of the stock he does, as you might expect of that ancestry," and Mrs. Valentin nodded toward the formidable Eastern contingent. (Elsie was consciously hating them already.) "The fountain can rise no ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... Portugal before the birth of the great man who increased its lustre. It is not without interest to examine the history of the family, for it illustrates in a remarkable manner the origin of the most noble houses of the Peninsula. It is besides always of interest to study the ancestry of a great man, for the qualities which distinguished him are generally to be perceived also in ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens

... town, as she was fair, A purpose had to make her his sole heir, Both of his cattle and his tenement; But only if she married as he meant. It was his purpose to bestow her high, Into some worthy blood of ancestry: For holy Church's good must be expended On holy Church's blood that is descended; Therefore he would his holy Church honour, Although that holy Church he ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley

... in a gold frame announced that Mr. Leathersham was descended from the Gold Digger Indians, a noble ancestry indeed; and it was no secret that his wife had played in "The Gold-diggers," during its second ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells

... spiritual and ethnic association of the Mohammedan world with Mecca is always fraught with possible political results. The dominant tribes of the Sudan, followers of Islam, who proudly trace back a fictitious line of ancestry to the Arabs of Yemen, are readily incited to support a new prophet sprung from the race of Mecca.[211] The pilgrimages which the Buddhists of the Asiatic highlands make to the sacred city of Lhassa ensure China's control over ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... the Revolution speedily inspired a wave of mystic enthusiasm analogous to those provoked by the various religious beliefs which had preceded it. All they did was to change the orientation of a mental ancestry which the ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon

... members of that worthy family of undoubted ancestry and opulence, and known the world over as the "Cliques," have gone into the dairy business. The cheese-presses are kept and the churning is done in the big offices by the wayside; but the milking is carried on in a very ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various

... was thus a different kind of man from the Englishman. As a result of the divergent development on the two sides of the Atlantic from a common ancestry, their political habits had become mutually incomprehensible. To the Englishman, the rule of the nobility was normal—the ideal political system. He was content, if a commoner, with the place assigned to him. ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith

... years old. His background was primarily academic, a fact which, together with his Scotch-Irish ancestry, the Presbyterian tradition of his family, and his early years spent in the South, explains much in his character at the time when he entered upon the general political stage. After graduating from Princeton in 1879, where his career gave little indication ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour

... capital, dependent upon his abilities for his personal support, was regarded even by sympathetic friends as visionary. But nothing progressive is accepted as a mere optimistic vision by the predestined reformer. Remote Huguenot and immediate Yankee ancestry is perhaps a good combination for pioneer material. However this may be, his efforts were crystallized, shaped, sooner than most schemes of such magnitude. Continuing his classes in piano, organ and voice ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various

... and noble line. In these secret charnel houses were buried the bodies of the oppressed, while in the haughty tombs around and above them lay the bones of their oppressors. The unfortunate and fragile boy, the last sole scion of a long line of ancestry, had there met the thronging and complaining ghosts of past generations. Burdened with these dreadful secrets, when his vanquished father seeks him to embrace him for the last time, he shudderingly hints to him of fearful knowledge, and induces his parent to accompany him into the subterranean ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... war as the world never saw. War is commonly, and almost universally, between nations foreign to each other—whose individuals are strangers to each other, and whose interests are widely separated. But we are a nation of brothers, of a common ancestry, and bound together by a thousand memories of the past—a thousand ties of interest and blood. It will be a war between brothers—between you who come to us in summer, and we who visit you in winter. It will be a war ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden

... giant whose massive frame and fair hair, that gleamed ruddy in the sun, proclaimed some foreign ancestry was the praefectus in command of this ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... customary with his family, he had died on the field, grimly facing fearful odds to the last. The last of his line, he had made a good ending, not unworthy his distinguished ancestry; for none of the proud and gallant race had ever died in the service of a better cause, be it that of king or Parliament, than this young soldier who had just laid down his life for love ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... to flow back into it. Mary Magdalen had brought a dog with her—a yellow dog of unknown ancestry, of shamefaced demeanor, a ropy tail, splay feet, and a rolling eye; named, she and heaven alone ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler

... Chevy Chace in proper time and tune with her, was the only secular accomplishment in which my dear grandmother personally labored to perfect me, except knitting and curious old-fashioned needlework. The pride of ancestry took strong hold of my mind, and such an ancestry accorded but too well with my romance, innate and acquired. It stood me, many a time, in the stead of better things, when nerving myself to endure affliction and wrong; and therefore I notice it, to warn you against exposing your ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth

... Her blue eyes lighted with admiring loyalty. She was blonde, big boned and so strongly built as to look actually formidable. Competency and reserve power fairly radiated from her. Her voice betrayed her Scandinavian ancestry. ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks

... have long been prominent in the old town. Samuel Snowden became sole owner and editor of the Alexandria Gazette in 1800, a paper that traces its ancestry back to 1784, and boasts of being the oldest daily newspaper printed continuously, still in circulation in the United States. Edgar Snowden succeeded his father as editor, at the age of twenty-one ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore

... according to her best knowledge of befitting dignity; but, unfortunately for her, the young American was of an outspoken disposition, and utterly untrammelled by those instincts of conventionality which Eliza had, not by training, but by inheritance from her law-abiding and custom-loving Scotch ancestry. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... mother. Now, nobody can desire to say anything against Port Said. At the same time, few mothers would inevitably pick it out as the ideal spot from which a beneficent influence for childhood's happy hour would be certain to emanate. Nor, it must be allowed, is a Suez Canal ancestry specially necessary to a trainer of young souls. It may not be a drawback, but it can hardly be described as an advantage. This, Mademoiselle Verbena was intelligent enough to know. She, therefore, concealed the fact that her father had ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens

... reason to believe her to have been a respectable person. Her relationship, unless I had had the advantage of her personal acquaintance, would weigh I fear, but little with me, and that of my great-grandmother nothing at all. The whole notion of ancestry—unless one's ancestors have been distinguished people—seems to me ridiculous. If they have not been distinguished people—folks, that is, of whom some record has been preserved—how is one to know that they have been worthy persons, whose mission ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn

... in Moscow, traced her ancestry back to one of the Buryat tribes of southern Siberia, a location that had become eventually, through the vast vagaries of history, known as the Buryat ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond

... forgetting to place its customary burden upon her graceful shoulders, had touched her countenance with a loving hand. With all her womanliness, there was, nevertheless, a certain firmness in the finely- moulded chin that gave evidence of a line of ancestry that had never been too deferential to ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr

... present purpose. He was right; he knew he was right. It was not hate, not even revenge, which had sent him forth, leaving love behind, but honor—the honor of the South, and of the frontier, of his ancestry and his training—honor that drove him now to meet Hawley face to face, man to man, to settle the feud between them for all time. And he rode smiling, gladly, as to a tryst, now that he was at last alone, ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish

... they planned; he was short and pink, and the uptilt of his nose was coherent with the appealing earnest-ness which was habitual with him. Eugene Madrillon was the sixth of these intimates; a dark man, whose Latin eyes and color advertised his French ancestry as plainly as his emotionless mouth and lack of gesture betrayed the ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington

... name, thanks to a pious ancestry, was Steadfast, partook of the qualities that his two appellations not inaptly expressed. There was a singular profession of steadiness of purpose, and of high principle about him, all of which vanished in Dodge at the close. A great stickler for the rights of the people, ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... speak of the men who created those things, and who were of no practical use to the community in which they lived. And the workmen in the factories listened to the drone of their engines until they too had lost all taste for the melody of the flute or fiddle of their peasant ancestry. The arts became the step-children of the new industrial era. Art and Life became entirely separated. Whatever paintings had been left, were dying a slow death in the museums. And music became a monopoly of a few "virtuosi" ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... lessen congestion. A child renamed Padney Socks she shook with shocks her moneybox: counted his three free moneypenny buttons, one, tloo, tlee: a doll, a boy, a sailor she cast away: blond, born of two dark, she had blond ancestry, remote, a violation, Herr Hauptmann Hainau, Austrian army, proximate, a hallucination, lieutenant ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... his heart. This woman never flinched. There was some reserved strength within herself upon which she was now drawing. His dealings had all been with half-castes—with impure blood and doubtful descendants of a mixed ancestry. He had never fairly roused a pure-bred English man or woman, and suddenly he began to feel out ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman

... the offenders, examined by Herr Sichart were descended from families in which there was degeneracy. According to these figures more than one fourth of the German prison population have received a defective organisation from their ancestry, which manifests itself ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison

... they appointed me water carrier. The employing boss was what is now called hard-boiled. He was a Cuban, with the face of a cutthroat. Doubtless he was the descendant of the Spanish-English buccaneers who used to prowl the Caribbean Sea and make headquarters at New Orleans. Beside this pirate ancestry I'll bet he was a direct descendant of Simon Legree. He suspected that I couldn't do much in a dyking camp, so he swarmed down on me the second week I was there and ordered me to quit the water-carrying job and handle ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis

... life to occupy a position not unworthy of his rank. For how many domestic mortifications did the first sight of that old abbey compensate! How often, in pacing its venerable galleries and solemn cloisters, and musing over the memory of an ancient and illustrious ancestry, had he forgotten those bitter passages of daily existence, so humbling to his vanity and so harassing to his heart! Ho had beheld that morn, after an integral of many years, the tomb of his mother. That simple and solitary monument had revived ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli

... you must expend in a war with the North, there will be thousands and tens of thousands of your sons and brothers slain in battle, and opened up as sacrifices upon the altar of ambition,—and for what, we ask again? It is for the overthrow of the American government, established by our common ancestry cemented and built up by their sweat and blood, and founded on the broad principles of Right, Justice, and Humanity? And, as such, I must declare here, as I have often done before, and which has been repeated by the greatest and wisest ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... under conditions with which we are fully acquainted. It may, however, be argued, and quite fairly argued, that such a process of evolution, though definitely proved, is a very different thing from such an evolution as would permit of a common ancestry for animals so far apart, for example, as a whale and a rabbit, or perhaps even nearer in relationship, as between a lion and a seal. To discuss this further would require a dissertation on the highly involved question of species and varieties, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... they thought that the policy proposed by Mr. Chamberlain would really achieve the object he unquestionably had in view, viz. that of tightening the bonds between the Mother country and the colonies. But that is what they deny. They rely mainly on a common ancestry, common traditions, a common language, and a common religion to cement those bonds; and, moreover, they hold, to quote the words of an able article published two years ago in the Round Table: "The chief reason for the sentiment of Imperial unity is the conscious ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... a broad wink and wriggled a thumb in the direction of the driver. "He's only cleared for Confidential material," said the general, his tone casting aspersions on the sergeant's patriotism, ancestry and personal hygiene. "This project is, of course, Top Secret!" He said the words reverently, his face going all noble and brave. Whitlow half-expected him to remove his hat, but he ...
— Minor Detail • John Michael Sharkey

... New River, which Sir Hugh Myddleton taught to flow through the meadows of Stoke Newington to all the streets of London, and so originated her modern water-supply. This knight, or baronet, he declared, upon the faith of a genealogist, to be of the ancestry of that family of Middletons who were of the first South Carolinians then and since. It is at least certain that he was a Welshman, and that the gift of his engineering genius to London was so ungratefully received that he was left wellnigh ruined by his ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... entering into their mothers' wombs and being born again. They must not only be born again but they must be born again each one of them of a new father and of a new mother and of a different line of ancestry for many generations before their minds could become supple enough to learn anew. The only thing to do with them was to humour them and make the best of them till they died—and be thankful when they ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... that cedar-scented room, sat the two ladies, forever guarding the faded furniture and the crumbling past. The pathetic contradiction of Miss Matoaca returned to me, and I laughed aloud. Miss Matoaca, who worked for the emancipation of women, while she herself was the slave of an ancestry of men who oppressed women, and women who loved oppression! Miss Matoaca, whose mind, long and narrow like her face, could grasp but a single idea and reject the sequence to which it inevitably led! I wondered ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow



Words linked to "Ancestry" :   sept, family tree, kinfolk, phratry, hereditary pattern, family line, folk, extraction, purebred, genealogy, side, inheritance, crossbred, family, kinsfolk



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