Tag: Say Anything

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

— John Adams

… prior to 1660 only five persons out of over 33,000 had genuine middle names.

— Kent P. Bailey & Ransom B. True [1]

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[1] Kent P. Bailey and Ransom B. True, A Guide to Seventeenth-Century Virginia Court Handwriting, Second Reprint 2015 (Richmond, Virginia: Virginia Genealogical Society, The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities) p29.

If an unsourced, private tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, serious genealogists cheer.

— Serious genealogist

Doveryai, no proveryai.

— Russian proverb

Is the genealogist insisting on sourced facts the whacker or the mole in Whac-a-Mole?

— kms

By a curious quirk of human nature, rather than Mother Nature, every American family of the surname Washington is related to George, all Adamses are of the family of John Quincy, and all Jeffersons are cousins of Thomas—at least as far as family traditions are concerned.

— Elizabeth Shown Mills, C.G., F.A.S.G.

If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?

— Coach John Wooden

I’ve come too far to see the end now
Even if my way is wrong
But I keep pushing on and on and on and on

— Nothing Left To Say, Imagine Dragons

“Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?” cried he, keeping up the earnest tone of his preceding conversation. “It lies upon the Present like a giant’s dead body!”

— Holgrave, The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

For there is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man: also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

— Sir Walker Scott