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Pedigree   /pˈɛdəgri/   Listen
Pedigree

noun
1.
The descendants of one individual.  Synonyms: ancestry, blood, blood line, bloodline, descent, line, line of descent, lineage, origin, parentage, stemma, stock.
2.
Line of descent of a purebred animal.
3.
Ancestry of a purebred animal.  Synonym: bloodline.






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"Pedigree" Quotes from Famous Books



... fettering dogmas of some romantic, realistic, or naturalistic creed in the free work of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of human perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors. It is a weakness of inferior minds when it is not the cunning device of those who, uncertain of their talent, would seek to add lustre to it by the authority of a school. Such, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad

... The Barnwells can trace their pedigree back about one hundred and fifty years to a Col. Barnwell who commanded in an Indian war. Subsequently the name appears on the right side in the Revolution. This is a long period to trace ancestry in Carolina; for while nearly all New England families ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... clavered and havered when he bought his pedigree bulls and his pedigree mares. "It's money clean wasted," said the old farmers, "for a calf's a calf no odds what begets it, and a horse that can work in chains and take its turn on the road is horse enough for any man, without sinking money in dumb beasts, and a' this sire-and-dam ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars

... I passed the bottle, seemingly rejoiced in his very heart at having some one to talk to,—"do you know, sir, that I have kept that by me here these ten years past? My good old father sent it to me as a mark of special favor. Why, sir, it has a pedigree as long as one of Locksley's cloth-yard shafts. But the pedigree will keep: let's prove it,"—and he filled up two dainty French straw-stem glasses, and pledged me in the good old Danish style. Then, when the claret came back, this time all rightly tempered, the Doctor filled the glasses, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various

... lowest to the highest. Just, or unjust, the institution represented, I verily believe, an ethnological fact. The golden-haired hero said to his brown-haired bondsman, 'I am a gentleman, who have a "gens," a stamm, a pedigree, and know from whom I am sprung. I am a Garding, an Amalung, a Scylding, an Osing, or what not. I am a son of the gods. The blood of the Asas is in my veins. Do you not see it? Am I not wiser, stronger, more virtuous, more beautiful than you? You must obey ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... waiting; but not a hair of his head had whitened, and if he looked older than he was, still he was young enough to marry the youngest debutante in England and the prettiest and best-born. He certainly had inherent breeding. His family had a long pedigree, and every man could not be as distinguished-looking as Ian Stafford—as Ian Stafford, who, however, had not three millions of pounds; who had not yet made his name and might never ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... dissension was not at first apparent, because Mama Therese was speaking, and what she said had exclusively to do with her estimate of Dupont's character, the mettle of his spirit, the stuff of his mentality, the authenticity of his pedigree (with especial reference to the virtue of his maternal ancestry) and the circumstances of his upbringing; which estimate in sum was low but by no means so low as the terms in which Mama Therese was inspired to ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... occupies a constant and conspicuous place in the lineage of Hengist and Horsa, as given by Bede, Nennius, the Saxon Chronicle, etc. In the list of their pedigree, Vetta or Witta is always represented as the ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... of human ancestry must hide its diminished head before the pedigree of this insignificant shell-fish. We Englishmen are proud to have an ancestor who was present at the Battle of Hastings. The ancestors of Terebratulina caput serpentis may have been present at a battle of ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various

... and with the zeal of a proselyte sealed his adherence to the Protestant Succession by baptising his next son George. This George became the publisher and editor of the Wesleyan Times. His children were brought up in ignorance of their Highland pedigree; and my correspondent was puzzled to overhear his father speak of him as a true Macgregor, and amazed to find, in rummaging about that peaceful and pious house, the sword of the Hanoverian officer. After he was grown up and was better informed of his descent, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... which the pedigree of all modern Wills may be traced is not, however, the Testament executed in the Calata Comitia, but another Testament designed to compete with it and destined to supersede it. The historical importance of this early Roman Will, and the light it casts on much of ancient thought, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

... picture? The spiritual light from that color must shine as brightly as ever; the intrinsic value remains forever fixed in Maud's soul; it is desecration to reject such a precious message. Why, it's like sending back the girl you married because her pedigree proved defective, or because she had lost ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick

... a handsome, aristocratic woman with a pedigree reaching back to Babylon or some other historic starting place. Her ancestors were Tories at the time of the American Revolution, and she was proud of it. Her husband's forefathers had shot a few British in those days, it is true, and had successfully ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon

... essays on his French and Irish policy. He stood firmly to the doctrine that men are governed by descent, that the historic nation prevails invincibly over the actual nation, that we cannot cast off our pedigree. Therefore the growth of things in Prussia seemed to him to be almost normal, and acceptable in contrast with the condition of a people which attempted to constitute itself according to its own ideas. Political theory as well as national antagonism allowed him no sympathy with the ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... foreigner, are seldom pronounced without some degree of intended reproach. That of barbarian, in use with one arrogant people, and that of gentile, with another, only served to distinguish the stranger, whose language and pedigree differed from theirs. ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.

... succession to landed estates; yet with one or two material exceptions. Like them, the crown will descend lineally to the issue of the reigning monarch; as it did from king John to Richard II, through a regular pedigree of six lineal descents. As in them, the preference of males to females, and the right of primogeniture among the males, are strictly adhered to. Thus Edward V succeeded to the crown, in preference to Richard his younger brother and Elizabeth his ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone

... that any drab would suffice to wive such pitiful adventurers. "Never choose a wife as if you were going to Virginia," says Middleton in one of his comedies. The mule is apt to forget all but the equine side of his pedigree. How early the counterfeit nobility of the Old Dominion became a topick of ridicule in the Mother Country may be learned from a play of Mrs. Behn's, founded on the Rebellion of Bacon: for even these kennels of literature ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various

... has to do with the human soul, which Christianity may be almost said to have invented. While all Paganism represents a few pre-eminent families, the founders of dynasties or ancestors of races, as of kin with the gods, Christianity makes every pedigree end in Deity, makes monarch and slave the children of one God. Its heroes struggle not against, but upward and onward toward, the higher powers who are always on their side. Its highest conception ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... misunderstand me as disparaging or disregarding the labors and ingenious modifications of others in various countries employed in the same field of invention. Gladly, did time permit, would I descant upon their great and varied merits. Yet in tracing the birth and pedigree of the modern Telegraph, 'American' is not the highest term of the series that connects the past with the present; there is at least one higher term, the highest of all, which cannot and must not be ignored. If not ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse

... of the King's Own—is the soul of honour. I do not believe a nobler gentleman lives in the whole wide world: but then we are descended from the great Glendower, King of Wales (I will show you the pedigree, some day), and have Tudor blood, too, in our veins. When dear papa died and we discovered he had been speculating unfortunately in East India Stock—'buying for a fall' was, I am told, his besetting weakness, though ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Will-o'-the-Wisp. Tom Callaway, master: he was your father. Your mother," he continued, "was a St. John's water-side maid—a sweet and lovely wife, who died when you were born. I was myself not indifferent to her most pure and tender charms. There is your pedigree," says he, his voice fallen kind. "No mystery, you see—no romance. Tom Callaway, master: he was your father. This man Top," he snapped, "this vulgar, drunken, villanous fellow, into whose hands you have unhappily ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan

... you are too reasonable. A contingency—only a contingency. But I should like to show you.' And he hastily sketched a pedigree that had at least the advantage of showing Felix ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... on to the other branch: the family of Dr. Johnson's mother. Here Dr. Johnson did himself a great injustice, for he had a genuine right to count his mother's "an old family," although the term is in any case relative. At any rate he could carry his pedigree back to 1620. "In the morning," says Boswell, "we had talked of old families, and the respect due ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter

... would have its history recorded in the fly-leaf as carefully as the pedigree of a racehorse ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey

... Palace that day, for it was the opening day of the great annual Kennel Club Show; the biggest society event of the year among dogs. It was a more exclusive assembly than any of the purely human sort, because every dog, among all the thousands there assembled, was an aristocrat with a pedigree as long as his body. There was not a parvenu among them all; and there are no human assemblies about which ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... reckoned we had two saddle-horses—those were their names, Nell and Ned, a mare and a colt. Fine hacks they were, too! Anybody could ride them, they were so quiet. Dad reckoned Ned was the better of the two. He was well-bred, and had a pedigree and a gentle disposition, and a bald-face, and a bumble-foot, and a raw wither, and a sore back that gave him a habit of "flinching"—a habit that discounted his uselessness a great deal, because, when we were ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd

... spaniel, prettiest of his race, And high in pedigree,— (Two nymphs adorn'd with every grace That spaniel found ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various

... found that, out of two hundred and sixteen cases in which horses of the same colour were paired, only eleven pairs produced foals of a quite different colour. As Professor Low[110] has remarked, the English race-horse offers the best possible evidence of inheritance. The pedigree of a race-horse is of more value in judging of its probable success than its appearance: "King Herod" gained in prizes 201,505l. sterling, and begot 497 winners; ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... getting down. There was a bright green streak down there that couldn't mean nothing but water, at that time of year; this was last fall. And over beyond, I could see the river that I'd went and lost. I looked and looked, but the walls looked straight as a Boston's man's pedigree. And then the sun come out from behind a cloud and lit up a spot that made me forget for a minute that I was thirsty as a dog and ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower

... over the five years 1901-1905. To these sums the value of horses alone contributed about three-fourths, Belgium taking more than half the number of exported horses. The export trade in cattle, sheep and pigs is practically restricted to pedigree animals required for breeding purposes, and though its ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... remember everything about themselves, and forget everything about you. They have the instinct of a flesh-fly for a raw. Should your great-grandfather have had the misfortune to be hanged, such a person is certain, on some public occasion, to make allusion to your pedigree. He will probably insist on your furnishing him with a sketch of your family tree. If your daughter has made a runaway marriage—on which subject yourself and friends maintain a judicious silence—he is certain to stumble upon it, and make the old sore smart again. In all this there is ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... unusual occurrence to witness as many as a dozen races during the space of two days. Sons of gentlemen, both in military and private life, were the owners of thorough-bred horses, each claiming the highest distinctions regarding full-blooded pedigree. These were Fredericton's glorious days—days of sport; days of chivalry; days of splendour and high life. On the evening in question, a festive board was spread with all the eclat attending a dinner party. Some hours previous a grand assemblage had gathered on the race course to witness a ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour

... was, enough), a favourite expression of the author, which at last superseded his real name, Abu al-Abbas Ahmad. He is better off than the companion nicknamed by Mohammed Abu HorayrahFather of the She-kitten (not the cat), and who in consequence has lost his true name and pedigree. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... thought of social grades, as he had done in connection with the smiles of the Miss Browns. Sophia Rexford had struck his fancy more as a superior being; and to angels, or to the Madonna, we do not seek to recommend ourselves by position or pedigree. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... you about my history, I have a little book with all the facts in, and even a few baby pictures, I'd like to show you. I have a swell place living out down in Como (opposite direction to the Elmhurst address) and if you tell me what time you're due here tomorrow I'll fetch along my illustrated pedigree!" ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis

... love for his pure blood. He had said to his mother that he hated money, that he hated the estate; but he would have been very slow to say, even in his warmest opposition to her, that he hated the roll of the family pedigree. He loved it dearly, though he seldom spoke of it;—as men of good family seldom do speak of it. It is one of those possessions which to have is sufficient. A man having it need not boast of what he has, or show it off ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope

... is generally from twenty-five to thirty thousand francs. As its name would indicate, this race, by exception to the fundamental principle of the Jockey Club, is open to horses of every kind, without regard to pedigree, above the age of three years. A horse that has gained a prize of two thousand francs after the publication of the weights is handicapped with an overweight of two kilogrammes and a half (a trifle over five pounds); if he has gained several such, with three kilos; if he is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various

... true. What parchment have we here? Oh, our genealogy in full. [Taking pedigree down.] Here, Careless, you shall have no common bit of mahogany, here's the family tree for you, you rogue! This shall be your hammer, and now you may knock down my ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan

... implements, for the government tea-plantations in the Himalaya. Being acquainted with the Chinese language, and adopting the Chinese costume, he penetrated into districts unvisited before by Europeans—excepting, perhaps, the Catholic missionaries—exciting no further curiosity as to his person or pedigree, than what was due to a stranger from one of the provinces beyond the great wall. His principal journeys were to Sung-lo, the great green-tea district, and to the Bohea Mountains, the great black-tea district; besides a flying visit to Kingtang, or Silver Island, in the Chusan archipelago. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various

... series of creditable relations, were indispensable qualifications of a candidate on the Olympic turf. It is true, there is at least as much attention paid to purity and faultlessness on the plains of Newmarket; but the application is to the blood and pedigree of the horse, ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... deserve a permanent place in the annals of table-talk. That fine old country gentleman, the late Lord Knightley (who was the living double of Dickens's Sir Leicester Dedlock), had been expatiating after dinner on the undoubted glories of his famous pedigree. The company was getting a little restive under the recitation, when Sir William was heard to say, in an appreciative aside, "This reminds me ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... masters[91]. The Stoics and Epicureans cared nothing for power of expression. Again, the Academic tenets were those with which the common sense of the world could have most sympathy[92]. The Academy also was the school which had the most respectable pedigree. Compared with its system, all other philosophies were plebeian[93]. The philosopher who best preserved the Socratic tradition was most estimable, ceteris paribus, ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... high Arabian pedigree, Father of many four-foot babes was he; And sweet hoof'd Beauties still would he be rumpling; But, counting five and twenty from his birth, At grass for life, unwieldy in the girth, He had obtain'd, alas! ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger

... among these people, like that of a Welchman, is a long pedigree of respectable ancestors, and indeed a veneration for antiquity seems to be carried farther here than in any other country: Even a house that has been well inhabited for many generations, becomes almost sacred, and few articles either ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... years after the battle of Malplaquet, she was; where her poor father was killed, fighting like a bold Briton for the Queen. With the help of a "Wade's Chronology," I can make out ever so queer a history for you, my poor old body, and a pedigree as authentic as ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Course of the Accidents of the Deathe of Mr. Serjeant Lovelace;" and on the 30th of August following, Richard Jones obtained a licence to print "A Short Epitaphe of Serjeant Lovelace." This was the same person who is described in the pedigree as dying in 1576. His death happened, no doubt, like that of Sir Robert Bell and others, at the Oxford Summer assizes for 1576. ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace

... especially the chapter entitled 'Her Path in Shadow' are delineated through a kind of mystical haze, suggestive of some of the work of Puvis de Chavannes. The concluding chapters, taken as a whole, indicate with tolerable accuracy Gissing's affinities as a writer, and the pedigree of the type of novel by which he is best known. It derives from Xavier de Maistre and St. Pierre to La Nouvelle Heloise,—nay, might one not almost say from the pays du tendre of La Princesse de Cleves itself. Semi-sentimental theories as to the relations of ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... other hand, are a most select class, whose pedigree is traced most carefully in the traditionary genealogies to the ancient head of some particular clan. One is chosen to bear the title, but there may be other individuals, who trace their origin to the same stock, call themselves ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner

... Whilst the lads are sent to those hot-beds of pride and folly—colleges, whence they return with a greater contempt for everything 'low,' and especially for their own pedigree, than they went with. I tell you, friend, the children of Dissenters, if not their parents, are going over to the Church, as you call it, and the Church is going ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow

... inquiry, however, the full and regular pedigree of these Nagles commences only with David, whose marriage and the issue thereof are recorded at large in Irish books of heraldry; whereas the preceding generations, to a remote antiquity, are merely notified ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various

... original or imaginative than the conception of the character of Donatello in Mr. Hawthorne's new romance. His likeness to the lovely statue of Praxiteles, his happy animal temperament, and the dim legend of his pedigree are combined with wonderful art to reconcile us to the notion of a Greek myth embodied in an Italian of the nineteenth century; and when at length a soul is created in this primeval pagan, this child of earth, this creature of mere instinct, awakened through ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... that the roving propensities of Sir Richard Burton are attributable to a slight infusion of gipsy blood; but if this pedigree were to be assumed for all instinctively nomadic Englishmen, it would make family trees as farcical in general as they often are now. At any rate, Burton early showed a love for travel which circumstances strengthened. Although ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... that "every Scotchman has a pedigree." It is a national prerogative, as inalienable as his pride and his poverty. Sir Walter's pedigree was gentle, he being connected, though remotely, with ancient families upon both sides of the house. He was lineally descended from Auld Watt, an ancient ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... living hundreds and thousands of men and women who were utterly unaware that they were descended from kings. Borrowing a little money to float him, he set up The American Almanach de Gotha and began (for the minimum sum of fifty dollars a pedigree) to reveal to these eager people the chain of links that connected them with royalty. Thus, in a period of time the brevity of which is incredible, this young man passed from complete indigence to a wife and four automobiles, or an automobile and four wives—I ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister

... admirable demonstration of the reasonableness of the legal succession, upon the principle of there being the greatest probability that the nearest heir of the person who last dies proprietor of an estate, is of the blood of the first purchaser. But supposing a pedigree to be carefully authenticated through all its branches, instead of mere probability there will be a certainty that the nearest heir male, at whatever period, has the same right of blood with the first ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... relative certainty of this, as of all other historical hypotheses of descent, is not comparable with the absolute certainty of the general theory of descent. It is now ten years since I first explicitly stated (in my "Natural History of Creation," vol. ii. p. 358): "The pedigree of the human race, like that of every animal or plant, remains in detail a more or less approximate general hypothesis. This, however, in no way affects the application of the theory of descent to man. In this, as in all researches into the derivation of our organism, we must distinguish ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... credibility of a common ancestry of animals still further back. But we may point out here that it is not a theory, based merely upon one set of facts, but one singularly rich in confirmation. We can construct, on purely anatomical grounds, a theoretical pedigree. Now the independent study of embryology suggests exactly the same pedigree, and the entirely independent testimony of palaeontology is precisely in harmony with the already confirmed theory arrived ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells

... of birth—verily, as thou hast said, 'it is a trifle,'" the King admitted with a laugh: "but I must create thee Master to the Pedigree of the House of Lusignan—a right royal post—and at thy discretion thou mayest find or make it of a color noble enough to mate with ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... fidelity to certain phases of eighteenth-century life. And later, Pierce Egan's "Tom and Jerry." I was brought up to consider the renown of the two Pierce Egans with reverence and permitted to read "Tom and Jerry; or The Adventures of Corinthian Bob" as part of the family pedigree, but it requires the meticulous analysis of a German research-worker to find any real resemblance between the artificial dissipations of "Tom and Jerry" and the ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan

... Hawkesbury Agricultural College, and Wagga, Bathurst, Glen Innes, Nyngan, and Yanco Farms. At Nyngan tests are made with a view to determining the suitability of the different varieties for cultivation in dry areas. The work at each farm consists of:—Pedigree plots of the main varieties grown on the farms; crossbreds in course of fixation for local conditions of soil and climate; a "stud variety trial," including all standard varieties, newly-introduced wheats, ...
— Wheat Growing in Australia • Australia Department of External Affairs

... last to purchase my naturalisation. I sent to Prussia for my pedigree; the attestation of this was sent me by Count Hertzberg. Although the family of Trenck had a hundred years been landholders in Hungary, yet was my attorney obliged to solicit the instrument called ritter-diploma, for which, under pain ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck

... ancient pedigree, A Justice of the Peace was he, Known in all Sudbury as 'The Squire.' Proud was he of his name and race, Of old Sir William and ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... contrary, has not learned his own importance, his pedigree, his beauty, his social place, his religion; he has not observed himself through all these and countless other lenses of time, place, and circumstance. He has not yet turned himself into an idol nor the world into a temple; and we can study him apart ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... out of St. Germains was better and fitter than a German prince from Herrenhausen, and that if he failed to satisfy the nation, some other Englishman might be found to take his place; and so, though with no frantic enthusiasm, or worship of that monstrous pedigree which the Tories chose to consider divine, he was ready to say, "God save King James!" when Queen Anne went the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... prince of Eldorado should come, with a pedigree of lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand, and a ticket of good-behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... accused and flung him into the secret prisons of the Holy Office. After some lapse of time he was summoned for a preliminary examination. Having first been cautioned to tell the truth, he had to recite the Paternoster, Credo, Ten Commandments, and a kind of catechism. His pedigree was also investigated, in the expectation that some traces of Jewish or Moorish descent might serve to incriminate him. If he failed in repeating the Christian shibboleths, or if he was discovered to have infidel ancestry, there existed already a good case to proceed upon. Finally, he was ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... was blue coat, red collar,—silver braid; arms, a sabre and holster pistols. As volunteers every man furnished his own horse, suits, etc. My horse, which cost me thirty guineas, I refused sixty for from Col. McNeil; our mounts were of Canadian, American, and English pedigree. ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... branches of the Congo river lived an ancient and aristocratic family of hippopotamuses, which boasted a pedigree dating back beyond the days of Noah—beyond the existence of mankind—far into the dim ages ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum

... the horses into the building, and straightway the subject was arbitrated with much feeling and snappy eloquence. Finally Hopalong thought that Red was a chump, and said so out loud, whereat Red said unpleasant things about his good friend's pedigree, attributes, intelligence, et al., even going so far as to prognosticate his friend's place of eternal abode. The remarks were fast getting to be somewhat personal in tenor when a whine in the air swept up the scale to a vicious shriek as it passed between them, dropped rapidly to a whine again ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford

... and character which prevail in our colonies are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art. We cannot, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... and yelled, I have a good, deep voice, due to a hound strain in my pedigree, and at the public-house, when there was a full moon, I have often had people leaning out of the windows and saying things all down the street. I took a deep breath and ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... usually greets the new trespasser on his patience by a shake of the hands. This ceremony is in general performed by the present Speaker with a gloved hand towards those not particularly distinguished by wealth or pedigree. When the new member for Preston was introduced to him, he was in the act of taking snuff, with his glove off. Mr. Hunt made a bow, not remarkable for its graceful repose, at a distance—apprehensive, as it struck me, that the acknowledgment would be that of a noli me tangere, exclusive. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various

... boys, even though minus a pedigree, were in demand; so he was promptly put on a farm. Though only a child, he had no one to care for him—and he was ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... the Trojans was at this period more than an article of poetical faith; it was maintained, or rather taken for granted, by the gravest and most learned writers. One Kelston, who dedicated a versified chronicle of the Brutes to Edward VI., went further still, and traced up the pedigree of his majesty through two-and-thirty generations, to Osiris king of Egypt. Troynovant, the name said to have been given to London by Brute its founder, was frequently employed in verse. A song addressed to Elizabeth entitles her the "beauteous queen of second Troy;" and in describing ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... of John Earl of Gowrie,' by the Rev. John Scott of Perth (1818), it is alleged that Elizabeth, in April 1600, granted to Gowrie, then in London, the guard and honours appropriate to a Prince of Wales. The same Mr. Scott suggests a Royal pedigree for Gowrie. His mother, wife of William, first Earl, was Dorothea Stewart, described in a list of Scottish nobles (1592) as 'sister of umquhile Lord Methven.' Now Henry Stewart, Lord Methven ('Lord Muffin,' as Henry VIII used to call him), was the third husband of the sister ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang

... accustomed to a flesh diet. Its wool began to take the coarseness of hair and the mild beast grew savage. The fore-runners of the larrikin were never very sheep-like in all probability, for if one could trace his pedigree, it would in most cases be found that he is the descendant of the true British cad. But he has improved upon the ancestral pattern and become a pest of formidable characteristics and dimensions. The ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray

... left with only one son—a Thutmosis like himself—to succeed him. The mother of this prince was a certain Mutnofrit,*** half-sister to the king on his father's side, who enjoyed such a high rank in the royal family that her husband allowed her to be portrayed in royal dress; her pedigree on the mother's side, however, was not so distinguished, and precluded her son from being recognised as heir-apparent, hence the occupation of the "seat of Horus" reverted once more to a woman, Hatshopsitu, the eldest daughter ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... pursue all the subtle threads from end to end might be eminently valuable, but not as a tribute to peace and conciliation. Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas. Sharp definitions and unsparing analysis would displace the veil beneath which society dissembles its divisions, would make political disputes too violent for compromise and political alliances too precarious for use, and ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... bare notion. It was as if some inner voice said to her: "Sell Derry!" Now Derry, the fox terrier, was her very own property. He had been given to her two years before by a cousin as a birthday present. He was of prize breed, and had brought his pedigree with him. He was a smart, bright little fellow, and on the whole a favorite in the household, though he sometimes got into trouble for jumping on to the best chairs and leaving his hairs on the cushions. It had never particularly struck Ingred that Derry ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... think of them all?" said Mr. Wood, looking down at me. "A pretty fine-looking lot of horses, aren't they? Not a thoroughbred there, but worth as much to me as if each had pedigree as long as this plank walk. There's a lot of humbug about this pedigree business in horses. Mine have their manes and tails anyway, and the proper use of their eyes, which is more liberty ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders

... silence again, and she watched a bronzed man rubbing down a great black horse whose blood had not come from a Cayuse pedigree until a faint drumming grew louder down the trail. It swelled into a sharp staccato, and the murmurs commenced again. "Two of them. Another man behind. Riding like brimstone. Can ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss

... might be, would succeed but to an emptied treasury; and Miss Amory, instead of bringing her husband a good income and a seat in Parliament, would bring to that individual her person only, and her pedigree with that lamentable note of sus. per coll. at the name of the last ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... prince, the Gaikwar of Baroda, is a reversal of the theme. When that throne fell vacant, no heir could be found for some time, but at last one was found in the person of a peasant child who was making mud pies in a village street, and having an innocent good time. But his pedigree was straight; he was the true prince, and he has reigned ever since, with none to dispute ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... An Anarchist I will say next to nothing. The pedigree of these tales is hopelessly complicated and not worth disentangling at this distance of time. I found them and here they are. The discriminating reader will guess that I have found them within my mind; but how they or their elements came in ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad

... Head of a House (King's Hall) in Cambridge, and lastly a Carthusian monk. He was also confessor to Henry VI., and wrote a book about him. In a MS. at Oxford there is a list of the books he gave to Witham, and among them is this Polychronicon. More: he has prefixed to the text a pedigree of the Kings of England from Egbert, illustrated with drawings, the last of which is the earliest known representation of Windsor Castle. We have not, then, to complain of lack of information about the early stages of the history; but then comes a gap, and between ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James

... sheep-farm all his life, assures me that he has never had and never would have a dog which was trained by another. But the shepherd of the ordinary kind says that he doesn't care much about the animal's parentage, or that he doesn't trouble to inquire into its pedigree: he breaks the animal, and finds that he does pretty well, even when he has some strange blood in him; finally, that all dogs have faults and you must put up with them. Caleb would say of such a man that he was not a "good ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson

... weakness, that each may have some one to help him to his particular need, all I can say is that, when he maintains it to be born of want and poverty, he allows to friendship an origin very base, and a pedigree, if I may be allowed the expression, far from noble. If this had been the case, a man's inclination to friendship would be exactly in proportion to his low opinion of his own resources. Whereas the truth is quite ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... the Kilmansegg pedigree To the very root of the family tree Were a task as rash as ridiculous: Through antediluvian mists as thick As London fog such a line to pick Were enough, in truth, to puzzle old Nick, Not to name ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... awful burden on the necks of tender women and distracted men. Sometimes this incubus takes the form of a pug, sometimes of a poodle, or simply a bastard cur admitted to the family bosom in a moment of unreflecting pity; size and pedigree are of no importance; the result is always the same. Once Caliban is installed in his stronghold, peace and ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory

... profession, or such as held prominent offices were recognized as gentlemen in sharp distinction from the common people, yet the generality of even these were looked far down upon by the county families of long pedigree and large estate. The Partridges, Dr. Sergeant, the Dwights, the Williamses, the Stoddards, and of course his brother-in-law Edwards, were the only men in Stockbridge whom Woodbridge regarded as belonging to his own caste. Even ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy

... sizes, colors and breeds. The snow-white Angora was there as well as the mangy alley cat. But all were on an equal at these meetings and there was no quarreling between aristocrat and the animal with no pedigree. All was harmony there. Could only the human race be as harmonious as these animals, the Brotherhood of Man would ...
— Billy Whiskers' Adventures • Frances Trego Montgomery

... most, the genius that can write twenty pages of—nothing—or the patience which reads it, word for word. This one is Sir Victor from date to signature, I'll swear. Well, yes, Miss Darrell, I know the baronet, and he's a very heavy swell and a blue diamond of the first water. Talk of pedigree, there's a pedigree, if you like. A Catheron, of Catheron, was hand and glove with Alfred the Great. He's a very lucky young fellow, and why the gods should have singled him out as the recipient of their favors, and left me in the ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming

... this glass Mrs. Makebelieve would comment minutely upon the two faces therein, and, pointing to her own triumphantly genuine nose and the fact that her husband's nose had been of quite discernible proportions, she would seek in labyrinths of pedigree for a reason to justify her daughter's lack; she passed all her sisters in this review, with an army of aunts and great-aunts, rifling the tombs of grandparents and their remoter blood, and making long-dead noses to live again. Mary Makebelieve used to lift her timidly curious ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens

... strength and persistency kept the communities asunder from age to age. The alienation, originating in a difference of race, was kept alive by rivalry in religion. The Samaritans endeavoured to cover the defects of their pedigree by a zealous profession of orthodox forms in divine worship. The temple which they presumed to erect on Gerizzim as a rival to that of Jerusalem was naturally more odious to the Jews than others that were more distant in space, and more widely diverse in profession. Distinct ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... Pedigree haz no more to do in making a man aktually grater than he iz, than a pekok's feather in his hat haz in making ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various

... What are you doing there? Are you going to spend the rest of your life like a Robinson Crusoe, in that pirate's tower?" He could live modestly; living is cheap in Majorca. Besides, he could solicit an office from the Government. With his name and pedigree it would not be difficult to accomplish that. He might devote himself to commerce under the direction and advice of a man like himself. If he wished to travel it would not be difficult for Valls to secure him a position in Algiers, in England, or in America. The captain had friends everywhere. "Come ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... the rising young turfman of the town, having first run his horses down Water Street; but future member of the first Jockey Club; so that in the full blossom of his power he could name all the horses of his day with the pedigree of each: beginning with Tiger by Tiger, and on through Sea Serpent by Shylock, and Diamond by Brilliant, and Black Snake by Sky Lark: a type of man whom long association with the refined and noble nature of the ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen

... the contrary, of a depth of operation more profound, and testifies to a genius and sincerity in Nature more subtile and religious, than we can understand or imagine. This apple that in fancy we now pluck, and hardly need to pluck, from the burdened bough,—think what a pedigree it has, what aeons of world-making and world-maturing must elapse, all the genius of God divinely assiduous, ere this could hang in ruddy and golden ripeness here! Think, too, what a concurrence and consent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... small counter, behind which a dusky man was standing, coatless and shirt sleeves rolled up. He had the skin of a Malay but the features of a stage Irishman of the old school. And, indeed, had he known his own pedigree, which is a knowledge beyond the ken of any man, partly Irish he might have found ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer

... your soft head. As for food, I'm afraid you're not taking enough arsenic. A slight touch of relationship to my family has evidently turned your brain. I cannot say how sorry I am that you should have discovered the one flaw in my pedigree. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, July 25, 1917 • Various

... which they asserted against the successors of Cyrus. Poverty and ambition prompted them to embrace the profession of mercenary soldiers: the service of his father and uncle prepared the reign of the great Saladin; [48] and the son of Job or Ayud, a simple Curd, magnanimously smiled at his pedigree, which flattery deduced from the Arabian caliphs. [49] So unconscious was Noureddin of the impending ruin of his house, that he constrained the reluctant youth to follow his uncle Shiracouh into Egypt: his military character was established by the defence of Alexandria; and, if we ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... her feelings by recourse to her favourite epithet. She took the whole pedigree to be a polysyllabic name. "Dear heart, to think of a country where the folk have names as long ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt

... The following is the pedigree of this royal clan, as given by the historian of the Goths,[5] and with those epithets which the secretary of Theodoric[6] attached to the names of some of the ancestors of his lord. (The names of those who wore the crown ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... way—whereas an artist who had been reading memoirs of the seventeenth century, and wished to bring himself nearer to the great Louis, would consider that he was making progress in that direction when he constructed a pedigree that traced his own descent from some historic family, or when he engaged in correspondence with one of the reigning Sovereigns of Europe, and so would shut his eyes to the mistake he was making in seeking to establish a similarity by an ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... Good-fortune, Fame, and Vertue stellesies;[3] One sweares the other doth her right incroch, Which is the elder house, none can deuise: The gods diuide, yet in the end agree The Fates shall iudge each others pedigree. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt

... tendencies which have been unconsciously sucked in with their mother's milk, and which, therefore, cannot be held up and analysed. The mystics, the humanists, the anabaptists, the spiritual reformers, are forerunners of the Quaker. They are a necessary part of his pedigree,—and they were all profoundly opposed to war. This attitude has become an integral part of the vital stock of truth by which the Quaker lives his spiritual life, and to violate it is for him to stop living "the way of truth," ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle

... I've never seen one that suited my notion as well as that black. Le Moyne had taken a heap of pains with him. A lot of folks gathered 'round and was admiring the beast, and asking questions about his pedigree and the like, when all at once a big, lubberly fellow named Timlow—Jay Timlow—said it was a great pity that such a fine nag should belong to a Union man an' a traitor to his country. You know, captain, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... laity, from whom they are no way distinguished by their dress. Some live retiredly, spending their time in meditation, or in delivering precepts of morality to the people. They are in roach esteem, as are another set called Seids, who derive their pedigree from Mahomet. The priests neither read nor preach in the mosques; yet there is a set form of prayers in Arabic, not understood by most of the people, but which they repeat as fluently as the molahs. They likewise repeat the name of God, and that of Mahomet, a certain number of times every day, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr

... father's genealogy, on both sides: "My aunt Julia derived her descent, by the mother, from a race of kings, and by her father, from the Immortal Gods. For the Marcii Reges [18], her mother's family, deduce their pedigree from Ancus Marcius, and the Julii, her father's, from Venus; of which stock we are a branch. We therefore unite in our descent the sacred majesty of kings, the chiefest among men, and the divine majesty of Gods, to whom kings themselves are subject." To supply the place of ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... behind, attired in antique robes. Next appear the municipality—wealthy, oily-faced citizens, at this moment much overcome by the heat. Following these are the Lucchese nobles, walking two-and-two, in a precedence not prescribed by length of pedigree, but of age. Next comes the prefect of the city; at his side the general in command of the garrison of Lucca, escorted by a brilliant staff. Each bears ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot

... Chatterton gave Mr. Henry Burgum, a worthy pewterer of Bristol, a parchment emblazoned with the "de Bergham," coat-of-arms, which he pretended to have found in St. Mary's Church, furnishing him also with two copy-books, in which were transcribed the "de Bergham," pedigree, together with three poems in pseudo-antique spelling. One of these, "The Tournament," described a joust in which figured one Sir Johan de Berghamme, a presumable ancestor of the gratified pewterer. Another of them, "The Romaunte of the Cnyghte," purported to be the work of this hero of the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers



Words linked to "Pedigree" :   family tree, filiation, family line, derivation, purebred, parentage, family, kinsfolk, side, strain, sept, kinfolk, breed, genealogy, phratry, folk



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