Once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground,
walked other men and women, as actual as we are today,
thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions,
but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another,
gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like
ghosts at cockcrow.
                                          G. M. Trevelyan

"Life is the rosebud, Eternity the rose."

"To live in the hearts we leave behind, is not to die"
 
 

    "The night has a thousand eyes,
        and the day but one;
    Yet the light of the bright world dies
        With the dying sun.

    The mind has a thousand eyes,
        And the heart but one;
    Yet the light of a whole life dies
        When love is done. "
                                ---  By Francis William Bourdillon
                                      Born Mar. 22,1852

"When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced.
Live your life in such a manner that when you die,
the world cries and you rejoice."   --- Old Indian saying

Human beings look separate because you see them walking about separately.
But then we are so made that we can see only the present moment.  If we
could see the past, then of course it would look different.  For there was
a time when every man was part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of
his father as well; and when they were part of his grandparents.  If you
could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would not look
like a lot of separate things dotted about.  It would look like one single
growing things - rather like a very complicated tree.  Every individual
would appear connected with every other.
                C.S. Lewis
                Mere Christianity

The more the ancient landmarks are destroyed, the more many of us hunger
for a firm anchorage in time and place.  Through genealogy the transient
flat-dweller of the cities can join himself to the peasants rooted in
ancestral soil or the baron ruling from his castle.  He can see himself as
a leaf on a great tree growing out the past into the future.  He can by
conscious effort recover the support of the sense of membership in a
kindred which was once the common birthright.
                Anthony Richard Wagner
                English Genealogy

The study of family history...shows how the past has poured itself into our
present life.  It embalms in the memory of the living the lessons,
examples, and obligations of an honorable lineage, and, as the Romans when
emigrating to foreign climes took with them the carved images of their
fathers and set them up in the choicest places of the new home, so it sets
the images of our ancestors before us to be an inspiration and benediction
to our lives.
                D.S. Durrie

We sometimes see a change of expression in our companion and say his father
or his mother comes to the windows of his eyes, and sometimes a remote
relative.  In different hours a man represents each of several of his
ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's
skin - seven or eight ancestors, at least;
and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which
his life is.
                Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is...a moral and philosophical respect for our ancestors, which
elevates the character and improves the heart.  Next to the sense of
religious duty and moral feeling, I hardly know what should bear with
stronger obligation on a liberal and enlightened mind than a consciousness
of alliance with excellence which has departed; and a consciousness, too,
than in its acts and conduct, and even in its sentiments, it may be
actively operating on the happiness of others who come after it.
                Daniel Webster
                Commemoration Address for First Settlement of New England

Always remember your ancestors were real live people with their joys and
sorrows, their dreams, their romances, their plans, their successes and
mistakes, and with their accumulated experiences, a part of the great human
history of the world; shall they be forgotten and unrecorded?
                William Grant Cook
                His Ancestors & Descendants

Every man is a quotation from his ancestors.
                Ralph Waldo Emerson

The roots of the present lie deep in the past, and nothing in the past is
dead to the man who would learn how the present comes to be what it is.
                W. Stubbs

There is a peculiar tug to the heart when you come face to face with the
record of your family.  The signatures and names of well-loved persons no
longer alive...remain intensely human, possessed of a warmth which is
denied to many sources of history.
                B. N. Goswamy