You have to deal with the fact that your life is your life.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.

Indeed optimists rather than defeatists have produced the results for which serious genealogical research is best known.

Many a young person tells me he wants to be a writer. I always encourage such people, but I also explain that there's a big difference between being a writer and writing. In most cases these individuals are dreaming of wealth and fame, not the long hours alone at the typewriter. You've got to want to write, I say to them, not want to be a writer. The reality is that writing is a lonely, private and poor-paying affair. For every writer kissed by fortune, there are thousands more whose longing is never requited. Even those who succeed often know long periods of neglect and poverty. I did.

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

It's an hour during the week where you can just slow down.

I acknowledge immense debt to the griots [tribal poets] of Africa - where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground.