Word: ancestors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...family, which includes the poet Lord Byron and Ralph de Burun, an aide to William the Conqueror. Senior Editor Otto Friedrich claims Bismarck's Foreign Minister, Bernhard von Billow, as a forebear as well as the French Dukes of Guise. Senior Editor John Elson notes that an ancestor of his grew the first pineapple in England, from a seedling brought back from the South Seas by Captain Cook...
...third favorite national hobby, after stamp and coin collecting. In fact, says Kenn Stryker-Rodda, associate editor of the venerable New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Record, family history "may now be outstripping philately and numismatics in popular interest." No small part of its allure is that ancestor hunting need not be expensive: the raw material and the rewards are in every family. Moreover, the new pop genealogy addresses itself to the lives, accomplishments, peccadilloes and personalities of flesh-and-blood progenitors, not merely the who-begat-whoms. Says Lynette Sherman, president of the Chicago Genealogical Society: "We no longer...
...this can be an obsessive pursuit, one of Minoan complexity. Tracing a family back to 1600 will involve roughly 65,000 ancestors, or half a million if you go back to 1500. The pastime demands the nose of a scandalmonger, the connective skills of an archaeologist and the flat-footed persistence of a private eye. It also helps if one is a linguist, a lawyer, a historian, a geographer and the bearer of a free pass on the world's airlines. It can lead to unpleasant surprises, such as finding that an ancestor was deported from Britain...
...most Britons, is a victim of inflation. When word got out that she was selling family heirlooms and that she was getting no aid from the state beyond a $26-a-week old-age pension, the response was outrage. Declared the Daily Mail: "When Marlborough, Churchill's illustrious ancestor, beat off England's enemies, the nation gave him Blenheim Palace. Is it too much to ask that Parliament, by speedy and special resolution, now grant a modest pension to Sir Winston's widow? That at least would be an act of belated grace...
...general secretary in the 1960s, Teng began backing away from Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward, and presided over a moderate program of economic reform. His gruff, authoritarian style as well as his pragmatic approach annoyed the Chairman, who once complained that Teng treated him "like a dead ancestor...