Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

When I was in school, my first acknowledgement of 'Roots' was Kunta Kinte.

My mother was from West Bromwich; my grandfather was Pakistani. I had an aunt who started trying to trace the family tree and stopped when she saw what turned up.

You want to try to find your heritage.

I don't know much about my family history except that my father had straight black hair and his ancestors probably came from India.

Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.

People like to trace their ancestry.

I was researching my family tree, and I was deeply hoping I was going to turn out to be Eastern European, but I'm not.

I really appreciate the British part of my family.

I love my heritage!

I looked up my family tree and found out I was the sap.

You can't run from your roots.

I've always been fascinated by family ancestry.

You don't stumble upon your heritage. It's there, just waiting to be explored and shared.

I do a lot of writing about my family.

Genealogy is among the fastest-growing leisure pursuits in the U.K. Indeed, the urge to uncover the truth about our ancestors has proved so compelling that, when the 1901 census first went online, the website crashed after a million people logged on within hours of its launch.

I've known where my heritage is from all along.

My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.

Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.

Some of what I am doing when I am researching is looking for things people in my family have done and finding out what those things mean, why they did those things and seeing how I fit into them.

I don't think anyone looks into their family tree and expects it to come up smelling of roses.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

I love many places to which I have no connection, but identifying an ancestor, or someone I think is an ancestor, has taken me to places I'd never have gone to otherwise.

I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.