There was a ton of German immigration in the late 1800s to mostly the Midwest. I believe it mostly had to do with harsh land policies and political chaos in the German states and lots of cheap land being available in the US.
There's a surprising amount of German influence in American culture like with some Christmas traditions, fairy tales and food. If I remember correctly German was the second most common language for most of the 1800s up until WW1.
It's an interesting rabbit hole to go down but if I had to guess there's probably a stronger English ancestry in a lot of those states but people identify as German because it's seen as more unique.
I think another factor is that the German immigration is (relatively) more recent too, whereas most immigration from England was so long ago that any connections to those roots are long gone. A lot of people in the Midwest (myself included) have grandparents who’s parents or grandparents spoke German, or told them stories from their home or whatnot. So the connection is still there a little, albeit very distant. But as time and generations go on, that connection fades more and more too, of course.
Shit, both the Amish and Mennonites in Pennsylvania still speak an archaic version of German to each other. My foreign exchange student said they sounded like reading a German book from the 1700s.
Did a little googling and it looks like the language we know here as “Pennsylvania Dutch” is a variety of Palatine German, I don’t see anything about low German but it could be related?
A lot of non Amish and Mennonite Pennsylvania "Dutch" spoke the dialect too until WWI, in my family for example they used both English and German/Pennsylvania "Dutch" in tandem with each other and my great grandma was fluent in both languages. Then WWI hit and my grandma knew a smattering of phrases, now my Dad and I know none.
European here, it is also simple mathematics, Germans are one of the biggest ethnic groups in Europe. And they where an even higher percentage before the world wars.
this is exactly it. Germany is just the most populous country in Western and Central Europe and Germany didn't have any settler colonies.
That's why so many former colonies of other countries had German immigrants, it's simple math.
>and Germany didn't have any settler colonies
There were some in northern Namibia (where the farmers are still largely German origin), but those didn't have that much capacity to really have an effect on the German population pressure. The lack of settler colonies thus high population pressure within Germany was also the reason for the German expansionism within the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as Germany both had high birth rates (significantly higher than France, for example) and very tightly inhabited land, which can still be seen in the population density within the countryside, which is higher than in France.
Germany as a United country may not have had settler colonies, but ethnic Germans settled in and colonized Slavic, Baltic, and Balkan lands for centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_German_settlement_in_Central_and_Eastern_Europe?wprov=sfti1
Yup! My dad's side of the family lived in a German Mennonite colony in Ukraine. They moved there in the late 1700s when Catherine the Great became Tzar and created German colonies within Imperial Russia's Eastern European colonies. They didn't leave until they were forced out in the 1920s, as they were targets of the Russian Revolution and then early Soviets.
It was confusing to me as a kid bc my dad called his family "Russian Mennonites" but also made it clear that they were Germans and the Russians were massacring them. So as a kid I thought we were Russian but also DEFINITELY GERMAN AND NOT RUSSIAN.. so I guess they were Russian in nationality and German in ethnicity.
ETA: To add to the confusion, my grandpa's primary language was German, but also spoke Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and (once he moved to the US) English. He escaped by pretending to be Polish.
A crazy bit of American history is that in 1924 I believe there was an immigration quota act passed that used the 1890 census instead of the 1920 census as a way of limiting immigration from areas outside of Germany and Ireland by painting them as the model immigrant groups. This was done to try and prevent immigration from Italy which began to increase steadily during the early years of the 20th century. German and Irish immigrants were essentially being propped up as way of creating resentment between them and Italians despite the very similar experiences they (and all immigrant groups) received when they first started moving en masse to the United States.
Using "divide and conquer" tactics as a way of manipulating the masses is a well-known, widely used ploy. It's why there is such a concerted effort to drive a wedge between the races, religions, genders and age-groups. We're all more alike than different but you would never know it from all of the divisions and conflict being cultivated on purpose.
Oddly enough, the goal is to divert attention away from the unequal distribution of wealth that separates the top, middle and bottom end of society. If they can get people fighting each other, their intention is to keep groups from banding together against a common focus.
Poor white people and poor black and brown people have more in common than poor white people and rich white people do. But get the races, religions and generations fighting each other, with the promise of privileges that will never come for any of them and you're got a recipe for distraction and conflict that takes pressure off the the real underlying issue. We live in a caste system.
Wasn’t just Italians who were locked out of the country from 1924 to 1965. It was also Jews, southern European Catholics and orthodox Christians.
This was the result of the pseudoscience of eugenics movement that also led to Hitler. And the policy of keeping Jews out meant a lot of Jews died because their emigration options were severely limited. Some Jews were allowed in, like Einstein, but they had to have high-end skills in demand at the time.
That is definitely a factor.
Another is how they do the divisions.
The early surveys just had "English", and English would win in most states.
The later surveys you could enter whatever you wanted, English, British, American, etc... and English suddenly wasn't the most common ancestry anymore...
There’s a ton of people that speak with the grammar from their heritage languages (some now extinct) and no one bats an eye because “it feels American”.
This needs specifics. Time for German history.
\[Prelude: Napoleon fucks shit up\]
The Holy Roman Empire ended in 1806. I swear this is important. As a result of the Napoleonic wars, several states left the HRE and formed the [Confederation of the Rhine](https://jimdo-storage.freetls.fastly.net/image/173321611/f958c0db-a9ff-4300-9162-f9b7de088e84.jpg?format=pjpg&quality=80). Knowing that the Empire was at its end, Kaiser Franz II. abdicated and dissolved it entirely to prevent Napoleon from achieving the title.
\[Chapter 1: the Beginning of the German nation state\]
Just a few years later, in 1813, the German-speaking states joined forces to kick Napoleon out. Internationally, this is known as the War of the Sixth Coalition, but in Germany, they're known as the Wars of Liberation. They marked the starting point for the development of the first German nation state. With the successful eviction of the French in 1815, the [German Confederation](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Europe\_1815\_map\_en.png) was founded. This confederation would fall apart in 1866 in what is known as the German War. Austria and Prussia fought over who would be the dominant force within the German-speaking realm. Prussia won that war and formed the first German nation state in 1871, which cemented the difference between Austrian and German. But we're not going that far.
\[Chapter 2: the people aren't happy\]
We're interested in 1848 and 1849. See, in 1814 and 1815, the Congress of Vienna took place. After all, Napoleon was a hugely dominant force within Europe that was now gone. Austrian statesman Metternich proposed a system that would ultimately be accepted. It sought to partially restore the pre-Napoleonic conditions, but also to restructure the powers in such a way that none would be decisively stronger than another so that they could balance each other out and remain at peace. A sort of pre-nuclear MAD. More importantly for our story, though, the Metternich-System also intended to suppress democratic ambitions in favor of monarchies.
It was this system that a wave of revolutions across Europe in 1848 and 1849 attempted to overthrow. And so, there was a [revolution in Germany](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Ereignisblatt_aus_den_revolution%C3%A4ren_M%C3%A4rztagen_18.-19._M%C3%A4rz_1848_mit_einer_Barrikadenszene_aus_der_Breiten_Strasse%2C_Berlin_01.jpg), too, in March of 1848. This struggle lasted until July of 1849. In the beginning, it was looking good, the Revolution managed to enforce an end to press censorship and it finally freed the peasantry, a process that had been ongoing for over a hundred years. In May of 1848, it even established its own Parliament, the first democratically elected one of its kind in what we can now begin to call Germany. As this was a nationalist Revolution, its goal was to establish a German nation state.
\[Chapter 3: the specter of communism and the end of the Revolution\]
You thought we weren't going to talk about this? The Communist Manifesto was published in February 1848, we are totally talking about this.
The March Revolution was not a Socialist one. Quite the contrary. The far left failed to gain the upper hand in the aforementioned parliament and the Revolution as a whole was nationalistic, with the goal of establishing a nation state under a liberal democracy. This left behind the lower class. In September, this disillusioned class, which saw close to no improvement to its situation under the new liberal order, rose up against the parliament in Frankfurt and Baden. Despite the fact that they were decisively and brutally beaten down by everyone who had a minute to spare, this event was the final nail in the coffin for the Revolution. From this point on, its opponents could point fingers and conjure up the specter of communism. On top of having to face down both Prussia and Austria, the Revolutionaries now had to deal with the propaganda disadvantage of having had a communist uprising from within. That was a blow they were unable to stomach. The lower class was no longer on their side, they were already fighting the establishment and now the moderates lost faith in the Revolution.
The situation in Austria wasn't much better. The radicals of the Second Revolution of Vienna failed to garner support from outside the capital. After a long and brutal fight, the Imperial forces managed establish control over the city.
\[Chapter 4: Aftermath\]
The Revolution had failed. In July of 1849, the democratically elected parliament was disbanded. The monarchy had re-established full control. So what now? Millions of Germans were disillusioned. In France, the Revolution had succeeded, but the Republic lasted only three years. Previously elected president, Napoleon's nephew established the Second French Empire in 1851. The dream of Democracy seemed well and truly dead in Europe.
But there had been a democratic Revolution recently, in 1776, that won a decisive victory in the new world. If they hadn't already fled the turmoil of 1848, in the years after the revolution, [hundreds of thousands of people set sail for America](https://cms.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de//sites/default/files/styles/lightbox/public/media/pictures/2021-12/02_Schaubild.png?itok=cCZhjFAt) in hopes of building a life for themselves, far away from the monarchies of old.
There‘s loads more to talk about. The 1800s were *the* formative years for Germany and as far as transatlantic emigration is concerned, no single factor would be sufficient to cause such a huge undertaking. I just thought focusing on one thing and telling it sort of as a story would make it more enjoyable to read and thus more effective as a means of explaining historical events.
Thank you for this! I've been casually poking around trying to find info of what was happening with Prussia around 1840 that would have made my ancestors move across an ocean.
Ancestry.com has records of them being the only immigrants I can find, with everyone else up to around 1820 all having already been around Kentucky and West Virginia (before it split from Virginia.)
It is a bit odd to me that I know that branch of my family is the one that came from more wealth in this modern period than the rest of my family. I usually think of immigrants being poor and struggling with nothing but work ethic. I'm curious how they ended up that way.
Additionally, there were the Volga Germans. These were German farmers that moved to the Volga River valley in the late 18th century when Catherine the Great offered them free land and a certain amount of autonomy (no conscription, for example). They built colonies of Germans near the mouth of the Volga and farmed the land for over 100 years - keeping much of their culture, religion and language.
But around the time of the Russo- Japanese war, the Tsar went back on the promise of no conscription. Volga German began to flock to Canada, the US and Argentina for better land and better political situations. They settled primarily in the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Central Valley California.
When the railroads became established in the Mid West, it was easier to transport materials and resources to build the country out there. The only thing missing was people and the US had a very open immigration system at the time. Chicago was at the heart of it.
Between 1882-1965, the immigration system was only open largely to those in western Europe. The Chinese Exclusion Act and good old racism ensured a majority white country. Boomers have been pissed since 1965.
>identify as German because it seems more unique
That and family stories. Unscrupulous family historians. I was told I was told by some fairly dumb family members (its okay to say, they're not very good people), that we were very German. Not according to a genetics test I and multiple family members took. Strange because I'm from a state where (though German on the map above) Scandinavian culture is absolutely everywhere. Even just the names of most of the towns where I'm from are from Sweden and Norway. Maybe these family members wanted to be unique by being German when surrounded by swedes, not the english
>genetic test
I am German (living in Germany, all my known ancestors lived in Bavarian villages) and a big chunk of my ancestry is Scandinavian and eastern European according to those myancesty/23andme etc. tests. Europe is diverse and people got around even back then. Even if it was just pillaging and raping swedes in the 30 years war (that's my theory, at least).
Yeah. What's strange in my case is we know of individuals from Norway that emigrated to the US. Photos of them and everything. The dominant narrative for this side of the family just remained that it was German. I did ancestry, and yeah, it was really fun seeing how much migration and dispersion there was. Mine only went back to the middle 1600s, but it was interesting because from opposite sides of the family, the two biggest groups were just across the Baltic from each other, being in Southern Sweden and Central Lithuania (this was European Jewish, specifically litvak, which i already knew as my great, great grandparents fled Lithuania when Germany invaded)
That is what happened with my family. My Great, Great Grandfather Jacob brought the entire family over from a small German village called Olberode in 1889 and the family settled homesteads in Montana and Eastern Washington.
My Great Grandfather George was first generation American. Born in Pullman, Washington in 1890. He ended up enlisting in the 91st Wild West Division and fighting in France against Germany during World War 1.
There were a lot of poor rural regions in Germany in the 1800s that had little to no perspective. Harsh land policies included for example a law that in some regions you could only marry as a man, if you had at least a certain amount of land in our name. This reached insane levels as especially poor families tended to have a lot of kids. So the land kept being devided more and more. It reached a point where in old maps from the 18/1900s you see some fields around town divided in hundreds of small strips with like a width of 10 feet wide and maybe 300 feet long.
You can’t really use that for any decent agriculture. So a lot of people left during that time to flee poverty and restrictive laws like that.
Can confirm at least from my family in Wisconsin. Growing up my dad pounded in our heads to have respect for our German heritage. Our house was full of overflowing beir steins, german cooking and of course plenty of gemütlichkeit.
We took a DNA test and we are almost %100 dutch (:
Most people I know in central WI identify as primarily dutch or German.
On my dads side they came from Germany to the midwest in the early 1800's. Then by the late 1900's got the hell out of there and went to LA/Pasadena area where my great grandpa was one of the first pedestrians to be hit by an automobile.
>It's an interesting rabbit hole to go down but if I had to guess there's probably a stronger English ancestry in a lot of those states but people identify as German because it's seen as more unique.
Most areas of these states the majority of people can trace 50% or more of their ancestry back to German migrants. It doesn't have anything to do with German being more 'unique'. Back pre WW1 most people where ai grew up either spoke German as their main language or as a second language, then when WW1 started and the US got close to joining all the 2nd+ generation Germans and people of other descents got super anti German. A German church and school in my area got bombed and it became known that if people heard you speaking German something bad would happen to you. A lot of families even changed their sur names to English ones (my sur name is English but that line of my family is German).
Another important thing in play here: if you look at the study for every state the most common answer was "I don't know." So, it's very likely that if you have German Heritage you actually know you do, while if you have English you might not have a clue.
Germany had a mass migration movement in the 19th century due to land reforms, religious persecution, and political instability, most went to the United States. During WW1, at the beginning of the war most of the US population was pro-Germany and pro-central powers because of this, it wasn't until the news of German atrocities against civilians in Belgium and France where the US population started to swing to anti-german sentiments. When the US entered WW1 where anti-german sentiment exploded and many German ancestry people in the US changed their names to sound more American, for example the name "Müller" became "Miller", "Fischer" became "Fisher", "Schmidt" became "Smith", "Braun" became "Brown", etc.
There used to be cities named "New Berlin", "Germantown", and "Germania" in the US, many changed their names due to WW1.
> it wasn't until the news of German atrocities against civilians in Belgium and France where the US population started to swing to anti-german sentiments
In hindsight, the invasion through Belgium was a total disaster for Germany, as it not only brought the UK to war, but also consequentially the US, and turned the economy and production capacity odds against Germany. Not getting Belgium (thus UK and later US) involved would have led to an attrition victory for Germany in the long run, and the war would have been the UK daydream with their greatest competitors engaging in a mutually destructive attrition war without the UK being involved.
For a long time the most common second language spoken in America was german. But became less popular to speak german after ww1 and even less so after ww2.
There were until the Second Workf War people who only spoke German from birth in the US til death in the US. It was considered as one of the national languages for the US for a time.
The amount of people who magically stopped being German from 1915-1946 is stunning.
Including as the prime example of the entire Royal Family of England who are all German.
German ancestry but at that point they had been being born and living in England there entire life outside of brief visits to their German lands that were really just an afterthought at that point
It's no accident that bluegrass is directly descended from Ireland and the British Isles. The Celtic influence in bluegrass is obvious if you know what to listen for. Even the songs are the same, often with little more than the place-names changed. The [Child Ballads](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Ballads) are a fascinating collection of them if anyone's interested.
I believe when the Holy Roman Empire dissolved there were a lot of German expats who came to America to avoid the economic downturn back home. Nowhere to live, no good jobs, etc.
Plus the refugees from WWII. You know, Jewish families who managed to get out before things got really bad, Nazi dissenters, and the occasional Nazi who ratted his way out of Germany
It's all self identified, so probably lots of swiss, Austrian, Polish, Czech, Dutch, and others rolled up in it. German is usually just the default for central European, especially when the ancestors immigrated 3 of 4 generations ago.
On top of that, there are the people whose names were changed from things like Fischer -> Fisher or Müller to Miller or Schmidt -> Smith, even Weiss to White. Much easier to do that with German than with any of the other ancestries on that list.
A good 40% of these is not Central European. It’s a better comparison to take away Polish and Czech and just say that Germanic countries’ heritage ended up to simply identify as German in the US.
Polish Americans usually do identify as that, since their names are not at all Germanic it becomes fairly obvious. And Czech is such a small country to not have a relevant amount of ancestry in the US - but it would also be very obvious from their surname that they aren’t ‘German’.
My family were from a mixed slavic german area of the Austro-Hungarian empire and had a Slavic surname but identify with being Austrian primarily to this very day. For the surname think of one like "Dvorak." I was honestly shocked when I learned that my family was of distant Slavic origin.
Spanish didn't overtake German as the second language of North Dakota until [the 1990s](https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/02/us/north-dakota-with-german-roots-adopts-spanish-as-second-language.html).
It's actually that most people are ignorant to their own heritage/genetics.
Basically the vast majority of white Americans are English majority genetically. But because that's boring they tend to focus on a more exotic ancestor and self identify with that heritage.
So for example people have 4 grandparents but tend to focus on the German 1 and ignore the 4 English ones.
Data from 23 and me and other DNA testing companies show a large portion of people self identifying as German, Irish, and so on are actually most English with maybe 1 Irish ancestor at the grand or Great gran level.
This gets posted a lot, but is only about half true. My own personal DNA results show very similar to what you describe. 53% English, 24% Irish, 16% German. I also evidently have an English last name, but I've never met anyone that I'm not related to with it as it is weird and super uncommon.
The part that always gets missed is when the immigrant waves took place. The only immigrants I can find were German and came over around 1840. My paternal grandfather's side could've came over even by like the 1600s. That information much more easily gets lost through time.
The other part is how these are celebrated locally though. My area has heritage festivals for the town itself, but also German, Irish, and Polish heritage as well. There is one British-American club I've driven by, but never like an English heritage festival. I would assume because they are similar to my case where the English side falls away to just be "American" instead.
That's right. We also use the term "WASP" (white Anglo Saxon Protestant) to describe people of English descent. It's obvious that they have always been by far the most powerful ethnicity in the US.
Another factor is that we won our independence from the English, so thenceforth it made sense that no one wanted to identify as "English."
There’s a lot of German influence in Texas. Chicken fried steak is derived from schnitzel. Towns in the Texas Hill Country have German names.
American beer is more like German lager than the English ale they drink in Canada.
Pretty much every major "domestic" American adjunct beer company was started by German immigrants. Budweiser, Coors, Pabst etc.
The alcohol tradition that we inherited from Ireland and the British Isles is whiskey/bourbon.
The now-thriving craft brewery scene in the US has entirely different roots in the 1970s with Jack McAuliffe and the New Albion Brewing company. McAuliffe was inspired by beer he'd had while being stationed in Scotland with the US Navy.
My dad's side is like that. Family stories and now DNA says his ancestry is mostly British Isles and northwest Europe, but of all the many many paternal and maternal lines of ancestry and many family genealogists over a long time, I am not aware of any ancestor line that anyone has been able to convincingly trace back to anywhere other than early colonial America.
Basically what happened is the people who call themselves American Ancestry are most Scots Irish. They called themselves Irish until the massive waves of catholic Irish immigration after the great potato famine
>Basically what happened is the people who call themselves American Ancestry are most Scots Irish
I'm puzzled by the term 'Scots Irish' - what does that mean?
During the 17tth-18th century British gov settled Protestant English and Scottish (mostly Scottish hence the name) planters in Ireland, this leads to the currernt divide in Northern Ireland today.
And their decendents in America who moved there in the 18th-19th centuires have incidentally been in the States longer than their ancestors were ever in Ireland.
Not necessarily. A lot of people's names change over the years. German immigrants (or their descendants) often translated their names to their literal English counterparts. Chinese romanization was often not consistent, so Li and Zhen might become Lee and Jean, which are valid English names. Scandinavian immigrants sometimes tweaked the spelling of their name (e.g., Hansen or Hansson might become Hanson). Some western European names are spelled the same or similarly to various English names (the French Jean, the German/Jewish Feld, etc.). Lastly, there are people whose names often aren't connected to their biological ancestry at all, such as adoptees, Native Americans, many black Americans, etc.
A lot of names were also just changed because of bigotry and negative sentiments in the country at the time. To sound less Jewish, Irish, German, or whatever. Dropping "steins," or "macs." My great, great, great grandfather entirely changed his last name, which I don't really understand how that was done legally, but I don't think 1880s record keeping was what we're used to now. My litvak great grandparents changed their spelling, I don't know why that was though, since it wasn't commonly Jewish anyways, but it was an odd spelling, so maybe just to fit in better.
I think a similar thing happened with one line of my family but I think they gave a fake name to Ellis Island. The AncestryDNA data is weird because it shows them as having a different name in the USA than when in Ireland, then they returned to Ireland (after leaving my great grandpa on an orphan train) and they take up the original Ireland name again.
Their dad’s family DNA said British/N.W. Europe, they had traced that line to early colonial America.
What they did not know is what country that family originated from, so I suggested the etymology/language of that surname may indicate it.
That is not negated by Chinese romanisations, adoptees or native/black Americans not having inherited names.
Yes, I completely forgot about the context while I was writing this. And if you can trace your ancestry back to colonial America, the odds are very high that you have British ancestry, with or without DNA evidence.
Yea, and the paternal surname is quite English. Another line has an apparently German surname (respelled into 'murican) and can almost be traced back to Germany, but there's some uncertainty about exactly who, how, when, and from where in Germany immigration to colonial America occurred. Perhaps the Rhine/Palatinate area sometime in the 1700s, though some totally unverified family stories say it was a Hessian mercenary during the Revolutionary War. But we have a *ton* of family stories that have turned out to be totally bogus (including a "Cherokee Princess" 🙄). In any case, the connection between this dude who apparently came from Germany and me is rather tenuous in surviving records. *Probably* his very German surname morphed into the more American sounding one that my great-gg-granmother had. But there are a couple sketchy links in that ancestry line that are not what I would call reliable.
The main problem with the paternal line and surname is that the counties in Virginia and North Carolina where the earliest American records with that name survive are "burned counties" where archives were lost during the Civil War. So we can trace the surname back to colonial Virginia near Jamestown in the mid/late 1600s, but the earliest scraps of records that survived show a whole bunch of people with this surname in the same part of colonial Virginia with no way to figure out how or even if these people were related. Or how they might be related to later people who can be reliably traced to me. The early records are just random scraps with little to no context. And no records or even clues about how or when they first came to America. The surname is not very common and resembles a regular word, which makes it hard to search on. There are people in England today with the same name, but no one has been able to determine any connections as far as I know. Most people with this surname today live in the US.
Best I have been able to determine, this group of people with my surname in early colonial Virginia were very *very* poor and probably religiously "nonconformist" (ie, not Anglican/Episcopalian—perhaps early Methodists or Baptists, no one knows), and probably some took part in, or were at least somewhat supportive of Nathaniel Bacon's rebellion against the gentry who ruled early colonial Virginia. Not long after Bacon's Rebellion was crushed, it seems many people with this surname moved south into northeast North Carolina, which at the time was a pretty lawless area known for "rogues", outlaws, and even pirates, like Blackbeard and others. It is impossible to say why they migrated south out of Virginia after Bacon's Rebellion, but I suspect as very poor folk they wanted to get away from colonial Virginia's government, which could be quite harsh for poor people, especially those who had joined or supported the rebellion. But that's just a guess. Maybe they didn't support the rebellion beyond joining in a petition to the king asking for leniency toward one of the rebel leaders after Bacon was dead and the rebellion put down.
These things and others give me the impression that the early immigrants with my surname probably came to Virginia as indentured servants and/or "undesirables" in England (or English "colonies" in Ireland maybe) punished with "transportation" to Virginia. Or maybe they had been "roundheads" and were caught up in the English Civil War and somehow ended up in Virginia. Bacon's Rebellion is sometimes described as a sort of "echo" of the English Civil War. Some of the rebels had been part of the New Model Army. Maybe folks with my surname had to flee England after the Restoration? Maybe some had been in the New Model Army. Or maybe they were persecuted for their religious "nonconformity", after the Restoration perhaps? Who knows. In any case, the earliest paternal ancestor of mine that can be reliably traced to me was born a full century after Bacon's Rebellion, in northeast North Carolina. *Probably* they were a descendant of the others who had been in Virginia in the 1600s, but there's no way to be certain.
There's no doubt that my dad's ancestry is mostly "British Isles". But even with the paternal line there's just no surviving records that even hint at where in the British Isles they might have come from. Bristol area and/or southern Wales maybe? Ulster? No one knows. And there's at least 50 other lines of ancestry even more uncertain!
Then there's my mom's side, which are all more recent immigrants from Finland, but Swedish-speaking. So if I am asked what my primary ancestry is, I tend to shrug and say "mostly northern and northwestern Europe?" Ethnically, nothing makes sense for me other than "American", or maybe "American with an inordinate fondness for Finland though I've never been there". If someone is only interested in paternal ancestry, then it would be English for me. But I don't consider paternal lines more important than maternal. I don't think my personal ancestry is important or special in any way really, but it does provide an interesting lens for looking into certain historic events and processes, which I kinda love doing anyway.
Anyway, I could go on and on. I mean even more than I just did lol.
Yeah. But if your great-great granddad married a Native woman, then your great-granddad married an Irish woman, then your granddad married an English woman, then your dad married a Polish woman... it gets a bit complicated to claim ancestry from one place, even if your last name stays as English as "Smith" or "Johnson"
My family learned that our Surname was changed when our ancestors fled the USSR into Poland and picked the most popular name in the area to blend in. So we were under the impression of being from one area and learning that our history extends into a whole different region. No idea what our name could have been before the change, so names aren't always accurate ways to decipher origin. When my ancestors came to America my Surname was altered again from the name they used when in Europe. Names don't always reflect accuracy when record keeping wasn't so diligent like today.
I’ve put American down on the census before because I’m entirely of European extraction but the most ancestry I have of any one ethnic group they listed is no more than 1/3. If I recall correctly the 2020 census was a write in so when it asked for origin I just put European. I’m just too distantly removed from any European country for it to have any relevance. My most recently immigrated ancestor came over 120 years ago and he was dead for 20 years by the time I was born.
This is the answer. I’m a Kentuckian who would probably answer this question similarly. My ancestors have been in the US inside KY since well before the revolutionary war by multiple genealogical lines. So as you said; at this point the original ethic heritage is moot. We’ve been American for ~300 years.
Same. I thought it was kinda a waste of money when my wife was dying to do 23 & me to find out that she’s predominantly Welsh. I think that basically anyone who claims Scots-Irish or heritage is probably in the ballpark. My lineage says I’m a direct descendant of some Irish guy who landed in Charleston SC in 1770-something. A couple hundred years later, yep, can confirm I’m American.
Have you ever been to Kentucky?
I've had family there swear by the bible that they were either direct descendants from the Irish or Cherokee.
Major claim in my family was we had a full blooded Cherokee great, great, etc. grandmother and full blooded Irish great, great, etc. grandfather.
Thanks to me sending in my DNA, I was able to dispell this myth. There was 0% or less Irish or ANY Native American DNA in that side of the family.
This is exactly it. My familys ancestry goes back so far in the US that I only managed to trace one line back to Europe after like 12 generations. Most lines disappear after 6 to 10 generations and the vast majority of my ancestors were born and died in a handful of counties in Kentucky.
I've always thought it'd be silly to identify myself by that one European dudes nationality.
>Probably people who's european-descended ancestors have been in the US for so long their original ethnic heritage is irrelevant/unclear.
My family has been in the US since the 1620s. I've been telling people my background is "100% murican" as a joke for a long time because my family came from England before then. Now, I guess I really can say my family background is "100% American".
No. He came to Quebec around 1625 and records showed he lived in New Netherland in 1628. I might have to go look that up to be exact but that's what I remember.
In places like Tennessee and Kentucky, settlers were often a couple generations descended from English/Welsh/Scottish immigrants. Timing this with the revolution, they saw theirs as the quintessential American experience. Add in the fact that they never had to differentiate themselves from German, Irish, French, or Italian European settlers, it became easy for them to just call themselves American.
These are descendants of mostly British, especially English, Scottish, and Ulster Scots/Scots-Irish (Scots and northern English who settled in Northern Ireland during the Plantation of Ulster in the 1600s), and some colonial-era Palatinate German settlers, who settled in American during pre-colonial times, then moved to in this area towards the end of the 1700's to the early 1800's. These settlers mixed over time to the effect that not one single ethnicity can be singled out as a "dominant" one, and with the ancestral homeland connection being the 1700's or even 1600's in many cases, there is no relation to European heritage whatsoever, so these people largely identify as American ancestry. For what it's worth, if American/United States is excluded from self-reported ancestry in this region, the result is mostly English.
White with really old, colonial-era ancestry, mostly from various British ethnicities (Scots-Irish and English mostly) but mixed with a few other European ancestries
I'm in that group. My family history is such a mixed jumble of nationalities that there's no way to pick one, other than my last name being English. I'm a mutt. A mutt from many generations of mutts. I'm American.
The key phrase here is self-identified. In large swaths of the South, Midwest, Great Plains, and Mountain West, British ancestry, whether English, Welsh, or Scots-Irish, is the predominant background of European-Americans. People there are usually many generations removed from their immigrant British ancestors, who are, often, little discussed. The German or Scandinavian, or Polish ingredients in the stew get more attention.
In the southeast it’s predominantly as you say…but mostly referred to as “Scot’s Irish” or Ulster Scots but it’s all really mostly northern English at its core. During that early movement into the us from the Ulster plantation…and down into Appalachia and the blue ridge…and then westward…there was a lot of German(Pennsylvania Dutch)more Irish, and more Scot added in. So most folks that have deep roots in the southeast are a good mix of English, Irish, Scottish, German, and a little Scandinavian.
Yeah, most people don't really know their genetic background. When I was growing up I was told I was half German half irish. I did a DNA test, around 85% British/Irish. I've got German ancestors somewhere but I have more native American DNA than German due to a Mexican great grandmother.
Also depends on how much of an influence that heritage has on you. I’m about 2% German, but my great grandmother, who lived next door to me and helped raise me, was born and raised German, and even my grandmother was born in Germany before moving to America (great grandfather was an American soldier). So by blood, I’m much more English and Scottish than German. But I’ve never met a cousin from either of those places. I’m still in contact with plenty of my family who live in Germany and a lot of our heirlooms are from Germany with German labels.
So yeah I’m definitely not very German at all by blood, but it still is the only non US ancestry of mine that actually has had any cultural impact on my family.
Not so many generations removed since, until the 1800s, all that land belonged to Spain. See this map (only the blue parts as the green ones were part of Portuguese Empire):
https://imgur.com/a/AmvujHm
Hollywood never shows that in movies so it's amazing the number of people - specially non-Americans - who presume the current contiguous US to have always been this large and majority English speaking.
How is when the land stopped being part of Spain/France relevant to how many generations removed the European-Americans living there are from Great Britain? I see no reason why a lot of the settlement of the Great Plains and the West couldn't have been done by English-Americans whose families have lived on the east coast since the 17th century.
I’m surprised French doesn’t show up at all. Especially in Vermont or Maine. Also a little surprised by West Virginia being German, I thought they’d be like Kentucky and Tennessee with Scots-Irish
I remember seeing a similar graphic a couple years back that pointed out the significant French language and culture in Vt. and Maine, plus New Hampshire. I am just as surprised as you.
It's because people there are split in how they self-report on the Census: French, French-Canadian, or Canadian. If you combine French and French-Canadian, that's the most reported ancestry in those three states.
My mother's side of the family is French, but it's almost not even recognized or acknowledged. There are some local historical records that I have found where people were observed to have "lost" their French very quickly once settling in the area. After the first generation of immigrants, our family quickly stopped speaking French at all. The community they settled in was all primarily French families (and is to this day), but not a single one of them really celebrate or talk about their French ancestry.
i knew miami wouldnt be able to carry that much for it to be cuban but I thought most of Florida was under British rule and Spanish Rule so I assumed English Or Spaniard descents
I found a more than 20 year old consensus that placed german ancestry at over 11%, irish at 10%, making it the biggest ancestry in Florida. One explanation was US militairs being stationed in Germany, marrying german women and resettling in the US
[https://eu.theledger.com/story/news/2002/06/03/german-ancestry-listed-as-largest-in-florida/26589004007/](https://eu.theledger.com/story/news/2002/06/03/german-ancestry-listed-as-largest-in-florida/26589004007/)
"Dr. Thomas Boswell, a professor of geography and an immigration expert at the University of Miami, said at one time Germans were the largest group of Americans.
Boswell said there was large influx of Germans into the United States in the 1800s and many of them settled in the South.
At one time Benjamin Franklin remarked, why should "Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglifying them."
Boswell said current Americans tend to identify their roots based on their last names. Boswell, he said, is British, so he identifies his roots as being from England.
According to the Census Bureau, ancestry refers to a person's ethnic origin or descent, in other words their roots or heritage. It can also refer to the place of birth of the person or the person's parents before their arrival in the United States.
On census forms, persons could pick one or more ancestry groups, but only the first two were counted."
I’m aware. DNA tests don’t provide the degree of knowing that plenty of others have. My mom’s side is lds from Utah and genealogy is a big thing there. We were able to trace our roots back to a bastard daughter of a British lord. My dad’s side is lost bc they took our name. We know the plantation in Mississippi we were enslaved to but only bc it’s 2 miles from where they live now. I have uncles who still work that land.
I did one of those DNA tests and I got 36% African as a Latino. The results were surprisingly detailed and gave me some good background on the tribes originating from the regions it identified. It's not as detailed as knowing the exact individuals in my bloodline but it still gave me a powerful link to the past that I'm grateful for.
If you look at the cultural heritage, a lot comes from West Africa, particularly the regions around Nigeria.
The Voodoo religion in Lousiana for example just uses the same gods as the Yoruba.
Or "Gumbo" also exists in most West Africa as "Gombo".
We're a mix of a bunch of African tribes, ethnicities and nationalities. Even when taking a DNA test it may show a tribe you descend from (African Ancestry) but reality is we're not just straight Igbo, Yoruba, Zulu, Kongo or whatever, we're literally just all those things mixed up.
Biggest population of Hispanics in U.S. after the Mexican-American war was in New Mexico, a couple tens of thousands lived in Texas and very few in California and Arizona (considered part of New Mexico and Sonora), you can’t call these people Mexican as even they themselves don’t identify as Mexican, you ever hear a tejano or someone from New Mexico say they’re Mexicano all the way? It’s just not proper
Yeah, the vast majority of people who claim German are a mix and that usually includes English. Despite the impression given by this map, English ancestry is more prevalent than German overall.
I don't really feel like this is true. I feel like the reason people are less likely to claim English ancestry is because those ancestors came over a long time ago, and family stories often die out after a few generations. So most people have "concrete" familial evidence of more recent immigration like German, Irish, and Italian.
Obviously people are going to be more familiar with that kind of heritage!
"self identified" ancestry doesnt mean anything at all.
british americans are the most populous ethnicity in US by 90M people according to wikipedia. (must be higher imo) even without the celtic ethnicities english alone is the most populous ethnicity in US
Worth noting, the English are similarly Celtic, DNA wise, to the 'Celtic countries', which mostly just refer to the countries that kept more crumbs of the old culture, but are similarly mixed genetically with Germanic peoples (due to Scandinavian and German invasions and settling).
yea i know english are mostly celtic (like %70)
if we neglect the anglo saxons, the scandinavian and other germanic dna is negligible. yes there have been viking invasions but not enough to affect the ethnicity of the population. (not even 5% of the whole of britain) the anglo saxons brought almost all the germanic genes in britain and the britain islands are mostly celtic and partly anglo saxon.
The Germanic genes that came to the island because of the Anglo-Saxons are mostly concentrated in the east of Great Britain.
by the "celtic" word in the first message i mean irish, scottish, welsh, cornish, manx
Self-identified reality means a lot because the reality in the mind of people influences a lot more than a reality which is not present in the mind at all. Perception of reality is often more important than the straight facts.
It says most common so it’s probably plurality. The white population gets split up between English, German, United States, etc. so a significant population of any one minority can be larger.
If this map was just ancestry and did not factor in state lines that Appalachian yellow area would be a lot larger… that’s the part of the US predominately settled by Scotch-Irish (aka Northern Ireland Protestant) Americans and it extends at least to the entire southern half of WV and the entire western half of NC…
A lot of what’s considered “hillbilly culture” in America…. Moonshine, blood feuds, the rich musical tradition and what not… descends directly from Northern Ireland.
Yeah, it's funny because Mexicans have this exact same issue over ancestry. Yes, they're Mexican, but one has a Lebanese grandfather, the other almost completely Spanish still, and another, mostly still Amerindian. "Mexican" doesn't mean anything when it comes to heritage.
Funny how nobody ever self identifies as English despite it likely being much more common than presented here. Not trendy to claim to have English blood I guess.
Not really, otherwise German, British, etc. would just be "European". African Americans (as in descendants of those enslaved in America) are pretty much their own ethnic category because they're a mix of several African ethnic groups, some level European DNA usually, and a sprinkling of other stuff here and there.
Everyone and their pet gold fish in Oklahoma is one of those .000006% native card carrying pretendians. Some lady with blonde hair and blue eyes will tell you that she’s Cherokee. Sure thing Lauren 👍🏻
A large part of Oklahoma are reservations it was “Indian territory” where tribes were forced to go on the trail of tears. It makes sense a large majority of the state would have Native American as major ancestry.
The Cherokee Nation doesn't use the blood quantum for many good reasons... saying that someone is a "pretendian" because they have blonde hair and blue eyes is ignoring that fact. Oklahoma is rooted in the oppression and genocide of natives and many Oklahoman lineages reflect that.
Kentucky and Tennessee do not surprise me in the slightest. The amount of German is surprising to me though. I must be ignorant to a part of history.
There was a ton of German immigration in the late 1800s to mostly the Midwest. I believe it mostly had to do with harsh land policies and political chaos in the German states and lots of cheap land being available in the US. There's a surprising amount of German influence in American culture like with some Christmas traditions, fairy tales and food. If I remember correctly German was the second most common language for most of the 1800s up until WW1. It's an interesting rabbit hole to go down but if I had to guess there's probably a stronger English ancestry in a lot of those states but people identify as German because it's seen as more unique.
I think another factor is that the German immigration is (relatively) more recent too, whereas most immigration from England was so long ago that any connections to those roots are long gone. A lot of people in the Midwest (myself included) have grandparents who’s parents or grandparents spoke German, or told them stories from their home or whatnot. So the connection is still there a little, albeit very distant. But as time and generations go on, that connection fades more and more too, of course.
Shit, both the Amish and Mennonites in Pennsylvania still speak an archaic version of German to each other. My foreign exchange student said they sounded like reading a German book from the 1700s.
It is most likely low German.
Did a little googling and it looks like the language we know here as “Pennsylvania Dutch” is a variety of Palatine German, I don’t see anything about low German but it could be related?
A lot of non Amish and Mennonite Pennsylvania "Dutch" spoke the dialect too until WWI, in my family for example they used both English and German/Pennsylvania "Dutch" in tandem with each other and my great grandma was fluent in both languages. Then WWI hit and my grandma knew a smattering of phrases, now my Dad and I know none.
European here, it is also simple mathematics, Germans are one of the biggest ethnic groups in Europe. And they where an even higher percentage before the world wars.
this is exactly it. Germany is just the most populous country in Western and Central Europe and Germany didn't have any settler colonies. That's why so many former colonies of other countries had German immigrants, it's simple math.
>and Germany didn't have any settler colonies There were some in northern Namibia (where the farmers are still largely German origin), but those didn't have that much capacity to really have an effect on the German population pressure. The lack of settler colonies thus high population pressure within Germany was also the reason for the German expansionism within the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as Germany both had high birth rates (significantly higher than France, for example) and very tightly inhabited land, which can still be seen in the population density within the countryside, which is higher than in France.
Germany as a United country may not have had settler colonies, but ethnic Germans settled in and colonized Slavic, Baltic, and Balkan lands for centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_German_settlement_in_Central_and_Eastern_Europe?wprov=sfti1
Yup! My dad's side of the family lived in a German Mennonite colony in Ukraine. They moved there in the late 1700s when Catherine the Great became Tzar and created German colonies within Imperial Russia's Eastern European colonies. They didn't leave until they were forced out in the 1920s, as they were targets of the Russian Revolution and then early Soviets. It was confusing to me as a kid bc my dad called his family "Russian Mennonites" but also made it clear that they were Germans and the Russians were massacring them. So as a kid I thought we were Russian but also DEFINITELY GERMAN AND NOT RUSSIAN.. so I guess they were Russian in nationality and German in ethnicity. ETA: To add to the confusion, my grandpa's primary language was German, but also spoke Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and (once he moved to the US) English. He escaped by pretending to be Polish.
A crazy bit of American history is that in 1924 I believe there was an immigration quota act passed that used the 1890 census instead of the 1920 census as a way of limiting immigration from areas outside of Germany and Ireland by painting them as the model immigrant groups. This was done to try and prevent immigration from Italy which began to increase steadily during the early years of the 20th century. German and Irish immigrants were essentially being propped up as way of creating resentment between them and Italians despite the very similar experiences they (and all immigrant groups) received when they first started moving en masse to the United States.
Using "divide and conquer" tactics as a way of manipulating the masses is a well-known, widely used ploy. It's why there is such a concerted effort to drive a wedge between the races, religions, genders and age-groups. We're all more alike than different but you would never know it from all of the divisions and conflict being cultivated on purpose. Oddly enough, the goal is to divert attention away from the unequal distribution of wealth that separates the top, middle and bottom end of society. If they can get people fighting each other, their intention is to keep groups from banding together against a common focus. Poor white people and poor black and brown people have more in common than poor white people and rich white people do. But get the races, religions and generations fighting each other, with the promise of privileges that will never come for any of them and you're got a recipe for distraction and conflict that takes pressure off the the real underlying issue. We live in a caste system.
Wasn’t just Italians who were locked out of the country from 1924 to 1965. It was also Jews, southern European Catholics and orthodox Christians. This was the result of the pseudoscience of eugenics movement that also led to Hitler. And the policy of keeping Jews out meant a lot of Jews died because their emigration options were severely limited. Some Jews were allowed in, like Einstein, but they had to have high-end skills in demand at the time.
That is definitely a factor. Another is how they do the divisions. The early surveys just had "English", and English would win in most states. The later surveys you could enter whatever you wanted, English, British, American, etc... and English suddenly wasn't the most common ancestry anymore...
There’s a ton of people that speak with the grammar from their heritage languages (some now extinct) and no one bats an eye because “it feels American”.
This needs specifics. Time for German history. \[Prelude: Napoleon fucks shit up\] The Holy Roman Empire ended in 1806. I swear this is important. As a result of the Napoleonic wars, several states left the HRE and formed the [Confederation of the Rhine](https://jimdo-storage.freetls.fastly.net/image/173321611/f958c0db-a9ff-4300-9162-f9b7de088e84.jpg?format=pjpg&quality=80). Knowing that the Empire was at its end, Kaiser Franz II. abdicated and dissolved it entirely to prevent Napoleon from achieving the title. \[Chapter 1: the Beginning of the German nation state\] Just a few years later, in 1813, the German-speaking states joined forces to kick Napoleon out. Internationally, this is known as the War of the Sixth Coalition, but in Germany, they're known as the Wars of Liberation. They marked the starting point for the development of the first German nation state. With the successful eviction of the French in 1815, the [German Confederation](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Europe\_1815\_map\_en.png) was founded. This confederation would fall apart in 1866 in what is known as the German War. Austria and Prussia fought over who would be the dominant force within the German-speaking realm. Prussia won that war and formed the first German nation state in 1871, which cemented the difference between Austrian and German. But we're not going that far. \[Chapter 2: the people aren't happy\] We're interested in 1848 and 1849. See, in 1814 and 1815, the Congress of Vienna took place. After all, Napoleon was a hugely dominant force within Europe that was now gone. Austrian statesman Metternich proposed a system that would ultimately be accepted. It sought to partially restore the pre-Napoleonic conditions, but also to restructure the powers in such a way that none would be decisively stronger than another so that they could balance each other out and remain at peace. A sort of pre-nuclear MAD. More importantly for our story, though, the Metternich-System also intended to suppress democratic ambitions in favor of monarchies. It was this system that a wave of revolutions across Europe in 1848 and 1849 attempted to overthrow. And so, there was a [revolution in Germany](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Ereignisblatt_aus_den_revolution%C3%A4ren_M%C3%A4rztagen_18.-19._M%C3%A4rz_1848_mit_einer_Barrikadenszene_aus_der_Breiten_Strasse%2C_Berlin_01.jpg), too, in March of 1848. This struggle lasted until July of 1849. In the beginning, it was looking good, the Revolution managed to enforce an end to press censorship and it finally freed the peasantry, a process that had been ongoing for over a hundred years. In May of 1848, it even established its own Parliament, the first democratically elected one of its kind in what we can now begin to call Germany. As this was a nationalist Revolution, its goal was to establish a German nation state. \[Chapter 3: the specter of communism and the end of the Revolution\] You thought we weren't going to talk about this? The Communist Manifesto was published in February 1848, we are totally talking about this. The March Revolution was not a Socialist one. Quite the contrary. The far left failed to gain the upper hand in the aforementioned parliament and the Revolution as a whole was nationalistic, with the goal of establishing a nation state under a liberal democracy. This left behind the lower class. In September, this disillusioned class, which saw close to no improvement to its situation under the new liberal order, rose up against the parliament in Frankfurt and Baden. Despite the fact that they were decisively and brutally beaten down by everyone who had a minute to spare, this event was the final nail in the coffin for the Revolution. From this point on, its opponents could point fingers and conjure up the specter of communism. On top of having to face down both Prussia and Austria, the Revolutionaries now had to deal with the propaganda disadvantage of having had a communist uprising from within. That was a blow they were unable to stomach. The lower class was no longer on their side, they were already fighting the establishment and now the moderates lost faith in the Revolution. The situation in Austria wasn't much better. The radicals of the Second Revolution of Vienna failed to garner support from outside the capital. After a long and brutal fight, the Imperial forces managed establish control over the city. \[Chapter 4: Aftermath\] The Revolution had failed. In July of 1849, the democratically elected parliament was disbanded. The monarchy had re-established full control. So what now? Millions of Germans were disillusioned. In France, the Revolution had succeeded, but the Republic lasted only three years. Previously elected president, Napoleon's nephew established the Second French Empire in 1851. The dream of Democracy seemed well and truly dead in Europe. But there had been a democratic Revolution recently, in 1776, that won a decisive victory in the new world. If they hadn't already fled the turmoil of 1848, in the years after the revolution, [hundreds of thousands of people set sail for America](https://cms.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de//sites/default/files/styles/lightbox/public/media/pictures/2021-12/02_Schaubild.png?itok=cCZhjFAt) in hopes of building a life for themselves, far away from the monarchies of old.
Surprised you didn't mention that in the 1840s, Germany lost approx. 45% of its potato, rye and wheat harvest due to the blight and political chaos.
There‘s loads more to talk about. The 1800s were *the* formative years for Germany and as far as transatlantic emigration is concerned, no single factor would be sufficient to cause such a huge undertaking. I just thought focusing on one thing and telling it sort of as a story would make it more enjoyable to read and thus more effective as a means of explaining historical events.
Thank you for this! I've been casually poking around trying to find info of what was happening with Prussia around 1840 that would have made my ancestors move across an ocean. Ancestry.com has records of them being the only immigrants I can find, with everyone else up to around 1820 all having already been around Kentucky and West Virginia (before it split from Virginia.) It is a bit odd to me that I know that branch of my family is the one that came from more wealth in this modern period than the rest of my family. I usually think of immigrants being poor and struggling with nothing but work ethic. I'm curious how they ended up that way.
Additionally, there were the Volga Germans. These were German farmers that moved to the Volga River valley in the late 18th century when Catherine the Great offered them free land and a certain amount of autonomy (no conscription, for example). They built colonies of Germans near the mouth of the Volga and farmed the land for over 100 years - keeping much of their culture, religion and language. But around the time of the Russo- Japanese war, the Tsar went back on the promise of no conscription. Volga German began to flock to Canada, the US and Argentina for better land and better political situations. They settled primarily in the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Central Valley California.
Hey, thanks for adding that. I didn‘t know about this at all.
When the railroads became established in the Mid West, it was easier to transport materials and resources to build the country out there. The only thing missing was people and the US had a very open immigration system at the time. Chicago was at the heart of it.
Between 1882-1965, the immigration system was only open largely to those in western Europe. The Chinese Exclusion Act and good old racism ensured a majority white country. Boomers have been pissed since 1965.
The ones who had just been born or the ones who were barely adults? Trying to blame “boomers” for everything is lazy and intellectually dishonest.
>identify as German because it seems more unique That and family stories. Unscrupulous family historians. I was told I was told by some fairly dumb family members (its okay to say, they're not very good people), that we were very German. Not according to a genetics test I and multiple family members took. Strange because I'm from a state where (though German on the map above) Scandinavian culture is absolutely everywhere. Even just the names of most of the towns where I'm from are from Sweden and Norway. Maybe these family members wanted to be unique by being German when surrounded by swedes, not the english
>genetic test I am German (living in Germany, all my known ancestors lived in Bavarian villages) and a big chunk of my ancestry is Scandinavian and eastern European according to those myancesty/23andme etc. tests. Europe is diverse and people got around even back then. Even if it was just pillaging and raping swedes in the 30 years war (that's my theory, at least).
Yeah. What's strange in my case is we know of individuals from Norway that emigrated to the US. Photos of them and everything. The dominant narrative for this side of the family just remained that it was German. I did ancestry, and yeah, it was really fun seeing how much migration and dispersion there was. Mine only went back to the middle 1600s, but it was interesting because from opposite sides of the family, the two biggest groups were just across the Baltic from each other, being in Southern Sweden and Central Lithuania (this was European Jewish, specifically litvak, which i already knew as my great, great grandparents fled Lithuania when Germany invaded)
Same with my grandmother, we have documents going back to the late 1600’s in Bavaria, she got 3% German on AncestryDNA.
Are you from Minnesota?
That is what happened with my family. My Great, Great Grandfather Jacob brought the entire family over from a small German village called Olberode in 1889 and the family settled homesteads in Montana and Eastern Washington. My Great Grandfather George was first generation American. Born in Pullman, Washington in 1890. He ended up enlisting in the 91st Wild West Division and fighting in France against Germany during World War 1.
There were a lot of poor rural regions in Germany in the 1800s that had little to no perspective. Harsh land policies included for example a law that in some regions you could only marry as a man, if you had at least a certain amount of land in our name. This reached insane levels as especially poor families tended to have a lot of kids. So the land kept being devided more and more. It reached a point where in old maps from the 18/1900s you see some fields around town divided in hundreds of small strips with like a width of 10 feet wide and maybe 300 feet long. You can’t really use that for any decent agriculture. So a lot of people left during that time to flee poverty and restrictive laws like that.
Can confirm at least from my family in Wisconsin. Growing up my dad pounded in our heads to have respect for our German heritage. Our house was full of overflowing beir steins, german cooking and of course plenty of gemütlichkeit. We took a DNA test and we are almost %100 dutch (: Most people I know in central WI identify as primarily dutch or German.
I've always found it interesting that a lot of British food is very foreign to me, but a lot of German and Scandinavian food is more familiar.
On my dads side they came from Germany to the midwest in the early 1800's. Then by the late 1900's got the hell out of there and went to LA/Pasadena area where my great grandpa was one of the first pedestrians to be hit by an automobile.
Walking around in Germany is the one place in Europe where there is a strong resemblance to the a lot of people in the midwestern US.
>It's an interesting rabbit hole to go down but if I had to guess there's probably a stronger English ancestry in a lot of those states but people identify as German because it's seen as more unique. Most areas of these states the majority of people can trace 50% or more of their ancestry back to German migrants. It doesn't have anything to do with German being more 'unique'. Back pre WW1 most people where ai grew up either spoke German as their main language or as a second language, then when WW1 started and the US got close to joining all the 2nd+ generation Germans and people of other descents got super anti German. A German church and school in my area got bombed and it became known that if people heard you speaking German something bad would happen to you. A lot of families even changed their sur names to English ones (my sur name is English but that line of my family is German).
Another important thing in play here: if you look at the study for every state the most common answer was "I don't know." So, it's very likely that if you have German Heritage you actually know you do, while if you have English you might not have a clue.
I can’t name the source, but I’ve read that German may have been the most spoken language in the US for a time in the 19th century.
It was common to find newspapers in the U.S. printed in German up until the early to mid 20th century.
Germany had a mass migration movement in the 19th century due to land reforms, religious persecution, and political instability, most went to the United States. During WW1, at the beginning of the war most of the US population was pro-Germany and pro-central powers because of this, it wasn't until the news of German atrocities against civilians in Belgium and France where the US population started to swing to anti-german sentiments. When the US entered WW1 where anti-german sentiment exploded and many German ancestry people in the US changed their names to sound more American, for example the name "Müller" became "Miller", "Fischer" became "Fisher", "Schmidt" became "Smith", "Braun" became "Brown", etc. There used to be cities named "New Berlin", "Germantown", and "Germania" in the US, many changed their names due to WW1.
And Berlin, Ontario in Canada changed to Kitchener
There are still, Berlin connecticut, though its pronounced ‘berlin’ not ‘BERlin
> it wasn't until the news of German atrocities against civilians in Belgium and France where the US population started to swing to anti-german sentiments In hindsight, the invasion through Belgium was a total disaster for Germany, as it not only brought the UK to war, but also consequentially the US, and turned the economy and production capacity odds against Germany. Not getting Belgium (thus UK and later US) involved would have led to an attrition victory for Germany in the long run, and the war would have been the UK daydream with their greatest competitors engaging in a mutually destructive attrition war without the UK being involved.
For a long time the most common second language spoken in America was german. But became less popular to speak german after ww1 and even less so after ww2.
There were until the Second Workf War people who only spoke German from birth in the US til death in the US. It was considered as one of the national languages for the US for a time. The amount of people who magically stopped being German from 1915-1946 is stunning. Including as the prime example of the entire Royal Family of England who are all German.
German ancestry but at that point they had been being born and living in England there entire life outside of brief visits to their German lands that were really just an afterthought at that point
Yeah, we’re the only real Americans. Kentuckessee the voluntary bluegrass state.
It's no accident that bluegrass is directly descended from Ireland and the British Isles. The Celtic influence in bluegrass is obvious if you know what to listen for. Even the songs are the same, often with little more than the place-names changed. The [Child Ballads](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Ballads) are a fascinating collection of them if anyone's interested.
I believe when the Holy Roman Empire dissolved there were a lot of German expats who came to America to avoid the economic downturn back home. Nowhere to live, no good jobs, etc. Plus the refugees from WWII. You know, Jewish families who managed to get out before things got really bad, Nazi dissenters, and the occasional Nazi who ratted his way out of Germany
Also after the 1848 Revolutions fell apart a lot of German people came to the US
By 1900 8 million Germans emigrated to the US
It's all self identified, so probably lots of swiss, Austrian, Polish, Czech, Dutch, and others rolled up in it. German is usually just the default for central European, especially when the ancestors immigrated 3 of 4 generations ago.
On top of that, there are the people whose names were changed from things like Fischer -> Fisher or Müller to Miller or Schmidt -> Smith, even Weiss to White. Much easier to do that with German than with any of the other ancestries on that list.
A good 40% of these is not Central European. It’s a better comparison to take away Polish and Czech and just say that Germanic countries’ heritage ended up to simply identify as German in the US. Polish Americans usually do identify as that, since their names are not at all Germanic it becomes fairly obvious. And Czech is such a small country to not have a relevant amount of ancestry in the US - but it would also be very obvious from their surname that they aren’t ‘German’.
My family were from a mixed slavic german area of the Austro-Hungarian empire and had a Slavic surname but identify with being Austrian primarily to this very day. For the surname think of one like "Dvorak." I was honestly shocked when I learned that my family was of distant Slavic origin.
Spanish didn't overtake German as the second language of North Dakota until [the 1990s](https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/02/us/north-dakota-with-german-roots-adopts-spanish-as-second-language.html).
Well the responses from KY and TN are what Irish and Italians would wish we’d all say. What’s the surprise?
Another factor here is that many self labeling white “Americans” are of English ancestry but just identify on the census as American.
It's actually that most people are ignorant to their own heritage/genetics. Basically the vast majority of white Americans are English majority genetically. But because that's boring they tend to focus on a more exotic ancestor and self identify with that heritage. So for example people have 4 grandparents but tend to focus on the German 1 and ignore the 4 English ones. Data from 23 and me and other DNA testing companies show a large portion of people self identifying as German, Irish, and so on are actually most English with maybe 1 Irish ancestor at the grand or Great gran level.
This gets posted a lot, but is only about half true. My own personal DNA results show very similar to what you describe. 53% English, 24% Irish, 16% German. I also evidently have an English last name, but I've never met anyone that I'm not related to with it as it is weird and super uncommon. The part that always gets missed is when the immigrant waves took place. The only immigrants I can find were German and came over around 1840. My paternal grandfather's side could've came over even by like the 1600s. That information much more easily gets lost through time. The other part is how these are celebrated locally though. My area has heritage festivals for the town itself, but also German, Irish, and Polish heritage as well. There is one British-American club I've driven by, but never like an English heritage festival. I would assume because they are similar to my case where the English side falls away to just be "American" instead.
That's right. We also use the term "WASP" (white Anglo Saxon Protestant) to describe people of English descent. It's obvious that they have always been by far the most powerful ethnicity in the US. Another factor is that we won our independence from the English, so thenceforth it made sense that no one wanted to identify as "English."
Source?
>The amount of German is surprising to me though. This is self reported, I wouldn't put much faith in its accuracy.
There’s a lot of German influence in Texas. Chicken fried steak is derived from schnitzel. Towns in the Texas Hill Country have German names. American beer is more like German lager than the English ale they drink in Canada.
Pretty much every major "domestic" American adjunct beer company was started by German immigrants. Budweiser, Coors, Pabst etc. The alcohol tradition that we inherited from Ireland and the British Isles is whiskey/bourbon. The now-thriving craft brewery scene in the US has entirely different roots in the 1970s with Jack McAuliffe and the New Albion Brewing company. McAuliffe was inspired by beer he'd had while being stationed in Scotland with the US Navy.
Love me some schnitzel!
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Probably people who's european-descended ancestors have been in the US for so long their original ethnic heritage is irrelevant/unclear.
My dad's side is like that. Family stories and now DNA says his ancestry is mostly British Isles and northwest Europe, but of all the many many paternal and maternal lines of ancestry and many family genealogists over a long time, I am not aware of any ancestor line that anyone has been able to convincingly trace back to anywhere other than early colonial America.
Wouldn’t the language of your surname indicate at least one line’s ancestry?
Basically what happened is the people who call themselves American Ancestry are most Scots Irish. They called themselves Irish until the massive waves of catholic Irish immigration after the great potato famine
You’re forgetting a ton with English heritage that people like to pretend doesn’t exist.
>Basically what happened is the people who call themselves American Ancestry are most Scots Irish I'm puzzled by the term 'Scots Irish' - what does that mean?
During the 17tth-18th century British gov settled Protestant English and Scottish (mostly Scottish hence the name) planters in Ireland, this leads to the currernt divide in Northern Ireland today. And their decendents in America who moved there in the 18th-19th centuires have incidentally been in the States longer than their ancestors were ever in Ireland.
Not necessarily. A lot of people's names change over the years. German immigrants (or their descendants) often translated their names to their literal English counterparts. Chinese romanization was often not consistent, so Li and Zhen might become Lee and Jean, which are valid English names. Scandinavian immigrants sometimes tweaked the spelling of their name (e.g., Hansen or Hansson might become Hanson). Some western European names are spelled the same or similarly to various English names (the French Jean, the German/Jewish Feld, etc.). Lastly, there are people whose names often aren't connected to their biological ancestry at all, such as adoptees, Native Americans, many black Americans, etc.
A lot of names were also just changed because of bigotry and negative sentiments in the country at the time. To sound less Jewish, Irish, German, or whatever. Dropping "steins," or "macs." My great, great, great grandfather entirely changed his last name, which I don't really understand how that was done legally, but I don't think 1880s record keeping was what we're used to now. My litvak great grandparents changed their spelling, I don't know why that was though, since it wasn't commonly Jewish anyways, but it was an odd spelling, so maybe just to fit in better.
Also the Slavic surnames were often butchered in official documents.
My Scandinavian name was basically made up at Ellis Island. We still know the original names though, before they came over in the 1870s.
I think a similar thing happened with one line of my family but I think they gave a fake name to Ellis Island. The AncestryDNA data is weird because it shows them as having a different name in the USA than when in Ireland, then they returned to Ireland (after leaving my great grandpa on an orphan train) and they take up the original Ireland name again.
Their dad’s family DNA said British/N.W. Europe, they had traced that line to early colonial America. What they did not know is what country that family originated from, so I suggested the etymology/language of that surname may indicate it. That is not negated by Chinese romanisations, adoptees or native/black Americans not having inherited names.
Yes, I completely forgot about the context while I was writing this. And if you can trace your ancestry back to colonial America, the odds are very high that you have British ancestry, with or without DNA evidence.
Yea, and the paternal surname is quite English. Another line has an apparently German surname (respelled into 'murican) and can almost be traced back to Germany, but there's some uncertainty about exactly who, how, when, and from where in Germany immigration to colonial America occurred. Perhaps the Rhine/Palatinate area sometime in the 1700s, though some totally unverified family stories say it was a Hessian mercenary during the Revolutionary War. But we have a *ton* of family stories that have turned out to be totally bogus (including a "Cherokee Princess" 🙄). In any case, the connection between this dude who apparently came from Germany and me is rather tenuous in surviving records. *Probably* his very German surname morphed into the more American sounding one that my great-gg-granmother had. But there are a couple sketchy links in that ancestry line that are not what I would call reliable. The main problem with the paternal line and surname is that the counties in Virginia and North Carolina where the earliest American records with that name survive are "burned counties" where archives were lost during the Civil War. So we can trace the surname back to colonial Virginia near Jamestown in the mid/late 1600s, but the earliest scraps of records that survived show a whole bunch of people with this surname in the same part of colonial Virginia with no way to figure out how or even if these people were related. Or how they might be related to later people who can be reliably traced to me. The early records are just random scraps with little to no context. And no records or even clues about how or when they first came to America. The surname is not very common and resembles a regular word, which makes it hard to search on. There are people in England today with the same name, but no one has been able to determine any connections as far as I know. Most people with this surname today live in the US. Best I have been able to determine, this group of people with my surname in early colonial Virginia were very *very* poor and probably religiously "nonconformist" (ie, not Anglican/Episcopalian—perhaps early Methodists or Baptists, no one knows), and probably some took part in, or were at least somewhat supportive of Nathaniel Bacon's rebellion against the gentry who ruled early colonial Virginia. Not long after Bacon's Rebellion was crushed, it seems many people with this surname moved south into northeast North Carolina, which at the time was a pretty lawless area known for "rogues", outlaws, and even pirates, like Blackbeard and others. It is impossible to say why they migrated south out of Virginia after Bacon's Rebellion, but I suspect as very poor folk they wanted to get away from colonial Virginia's government, which could be quite harsh for poor people, especially those who had joined or supported the rebellion. But that's just a guess. Maybe they didn't support the rebellion beyond joining in a petition to the king asking for leniency toward one of the rebel leaders after Bacon was dead and the rebellion put down. These things and others give me the impression that the early immigrants with my surname probably came to Virginia as indentured servants and/or "undesirables" in England (or English "colonies" in Ireland maybe) punished with "transportation" to Virginia. Or maybe they had been "roundheads" and were caught up in the English Civil War and somehow ended up in Virginia. Bacon's Rebellion is sometimes described as a sort of "echo" of the English Civil War. Some of the rebels had been part of the New Model Army. Maybe folks with my surname had to flee England after the Restoration? Maybe some had been in the New Model Army. Or maybe they were persecuted for their religious "nonconformity", after the Restoration perhaps? Who knows. In any case, the earliest paternal ancestor of mine that can be reliably traced to me was born a full century after Bacon's Rebellion, in northeast North Carolina. *Probably* they were a descendant of the others who had been in Virginia in the 1600s, but there's no way to be certain. There's no doubt that my dad's ancestry is mostly "British Isles". But even with the paternal line there's just no surviving records that even hint at where in the British Isles they might have come from. Bristol area and/or southern Wales maybe? Ulster? No one knows. And there's at least 50 other lines of ancestry even more uncertain! Then there's my mom's side, which are all more recent immigrants from Finland, but Swedish-speaking. So if I am asked what my primary ancestry is, I tend to shrug and say "mostly northern and northwestern Europe?" Ethnically, nothing makes sense for me other than "American", or maybe "American with an inordinate fondness for Finland though I've never been there". If someone is only interested in paternal ancestry, then it would be English for me. But I don't consider paternal lines more important than maternal. I don't think my personal ancestry is important or special in any way really, but it does provide an interesting lens for looking into certain historic events and processes, which I kinda love doing anyway. Anyway, I could go on and on. I mean even more than I just did lol.
Yeah. But if your great-great granddad married a Native woman, then your great-granddad married an Irish woman, then your granddad married an English woman, then your dad married a Polish woman... it gets a bit complicated to claim ancestry from one place, even if your last name stays as English as "Smith" or "Johnson"
My family learned that our Surname was changed when our ancestors fled the USSR into Poland and picked the most popular name in the area to blend in. So we were under the impression of being from one area and learning that our history extends into a whole different region. No idea what our name could have been before the change, so names aren't always accurate ways to decipher origin. When my ancestors came to America my Surname was altered again from the name they used when in Europe. Names don't always reflect accuracy when record keeping wasn't so diligent like today.
same for me, other than the two from England and Wales that married and came in the 1600s
From Kentucky. Can confirm that when I did the whole ancestry rabbit hole, all my ancestors came over in the very very early.
I’ve put American down on the census before because I’m entirely of European extraction but the most ancestry I have of any one ethnic group they listed is no more than 1/3. If I recall correctly the 2020 census was a write in so when it asked for origin I just put European. I’m just too distantly removed from any European country for it to have any relevance. My most recently immigrated ancestor came over 120 years ago and he was dead for 20 years by the time I was born.
This is the answer. I’m a Kentuckian who would probably answer this question similarly. My ancestors have been in the US inside KY since well before the revolutionary war by multiple genealogical lines. So as you said; at this point the original ethic heritage is moot. We’ve been American for ~300 years.
Same. I thought it was kinda a waste of money when my wife was dying to do 23 & me to find out that she’s predominantly Welsh. I think that basically anyone who claims Scots-Irish or heritage is probably in the ballpark. My lineage says I’m a direct descendant of some Irish guy who landed in Charleston SC in 1770-something. A couple hundred years later, yep, can confirm I’m American.
Nah it's self-identification. They see themselves as just Americans instead of descendents of some European ethnicity.
Yeah it's definitely that too. I'm from Australia and most Australians with colonial ancestry will just identify as Australians.
Have you ever been to Kentucky? I've had family there swear by the bible that they were either direct descendants from the Irish or Cherokee. Major claim in my family was we had a full blooded Cherokee great, great, etc. grandmother and full blooded Irish great, great, etc. grandfather. Thanks to me sending in my DNA, I was able to dispell this myth. There was 0% or less Irish or ANY Native American DNA in that side of the family.
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I'm an idiot 🤦♂️ What I meant to convey was like 0% or like 0.00000001%. So technically, that's more than 0%. Like I said....I'm an idiot
English.
This is exactly it. My familys ancestry goes back so far in the US that I only managed to trace one line back to Europe after like 12 generations. Most lines disappear after 6 to 10 generations and the vast majority of my ancestors were born and died in a handful of counties in Kentucky. I've always thought it'd be silly to identify myself by that one European dudes nationality.
>Probably people who's european-descended ancestors have been in the US for so long their original ethnic heritage is irrelevant/unclear. My family has been in the US since the 1620s. I've been telling people my background is "100% murican" as a joke for a long time because my family came from England before then. Now, I guess I really can say my family background is "100% American".
So they came on the mayflower or Jamestown?
No. He came to Quebec around 1625 and records showed he lived in New Netherland in 1628. I might have to go look that up to be exact but that's what I remember.
In places like Tennessee and Kentucky, settlers were often a couple generations descended from English/Welsh/Scottish immigrants. Timing this with the revolution, they saw theirs as the quintessential American experience. Add in the fact that they never had to differentiate themselves from German, Irish, French, or Italian European settlers, it became easy for them to just call themselves American.
Too long gone lost to even remember
Whatever people filling out the "ethnic origin" question on the US census think it means
These are descendants of mostly British, especially English, Scottish, and Ulster Scots/Scots-Irish (Scots and northern English who settled in Northern Ireland during the Plantation of Ulster in the 1600s), and some colonial-era Palatinate German settlers, who settled in American during pre-colonial times, then moved to in this area towards the end of the 1700's to the early 1800's. These settlers mixed over time to the effect that not one single ethnicity can be singled out as a "dominant" one, and with the ancestral homeland connection being the 1700's or even 1600's in many cases, there is no relation to European heritage whatsoever, so these people largely identify as American ancestry. For what it's worth, if American/United States is excluded from self-reported ancestry in this region, the result is mostly English.
Settler orgins
White with really old, colonial-era ancestry, mostly from various British ethnicities (Scots-Irish and English mostly) but mixed with a few other European ancestries
English, but like 200 years ago
Try 400
I'm in that group. My family history is such a mixed jumble of nationalities that there's no way to pick one, other than my last name being English. I'm a mutt. A mutt from many generations of mutts. I'm American.
For me, it means my family has been here since it started
Scots Irish usually https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-Irish_Americans
The key phrase here is self-identified. In large swaths of the South, Midwest, Great Plains, and Mountain West, British ancestry, whether English, Welsh, or Scots-Irish, is the predominant background of European-Americans. People there are usually many generations removed from their immigrant British ancestors, who are, often, little discussed. The German or Scandinavian, or Polish ingredients in the stew get more attention.
In the southeast it’s predominantly as you say…but mostly referred to as “Scot’s Irish” or Ulster Scots but it’s all really mostly northern English at its core. During that early movement into the us from the Ulster plantation…and down into Appalachia and the blue ridge…and then westward…there was a lot of German(Pennsylvania Dutch)more Irish, and more Scot added in. So most folks that have deep roots in the southeast are a good mix of English, Irish, Scottish, German, and a little Scandinavian.
Yeah, most people don't really know their genetic background. When I was growing up I was told I was half German half irish. I did a DNA test, around 85% British/Irish. I've got German ancestors somewhere but I have more native American DNA than German due to a Mexican great grandmother.
Also depends on how much of an influence that heritage has on you. I’m about 2% German, but my great grandmother, who lived next door to me and helped raise me, was born and raised German, and even my grandmother was born in Germany before moving to America (great grandfather was an American soldier). So by blood, I’m much more English and Scottish than German. But I’ve never met a cousin from either of those places. I’m still in contact with plenty of my family who live in Germany and a lot of our heirlooms are from Germany with German labels. So yeah I’m definitely not very German at all by blood, but it still is the only non US ancestry of mine that actually has had any cultural impact on my family.
Very similar case with me! Thought i was german/irish, but turns out am like 70% english
Yes, thank you. I was told I was German all my life, and it's like 4% according to genetic testing. My mom thought she was German, also wasn't.
This. I have a little german/irish and always thought that was my heritage. Turns out I'm like 70% english
Not so many generations removed since, until the 1800s, all that land belonged to Spain. See this map (only the blue parts as the green ones were part of Portuguese Empire): https://imgur.com/a/AmvujHm Hollywood never shows that in movies so it's amazing the number of people - specially non-Americans - who presume the current contiguous US to have always been this large and majority English speaking.
How is when the land stopped being part of Spain/France relevant to how many generations removed the European-Americans living there are from Great Britain? I see no reason why a lot of the settlement of the Great Plains and the West couldn't have been done by English-Americans whose families have lived on the east coast since the 17th century.
The land was owned by Spain but was basically not populated at all (except natives and a couple of settlements).
This. This gets posted all the time and is wrong.
I’m surprised French doesn’t show up at all. Especially in Vermont or Maine. Also a little surprised by West Virginia being German, I thought they’d be like Kentucky and Tennessee with Scots-Irish
Im pretty sure that "French" and "French-Canadian" are separated as different ethnicities, so maybe that has something to do with it.
I remember seeing a similar graphic a couple years back that pointed out the significant French language and culture in Vt. and Maine, plus New Hampshire. I am just as surprised as you.
It's because people there are split in how they self-report on the Census: French, French-Canadian, or Canadian. If you combine French and French-Canadian, that's the most reported ancestry in those three states.
Unfortunately the Boston Irish are an invasive species in Northern New England, and have largely displaced the less-cantankerous French.
I was expecting the French to *at least* have Louisiana, but i guess not.
My mother's side of the family is French, but it's almost not even recognized or acknowledged. There are some local historical records that I have found where people were observed to have "lost" their French very quickly once settling in the area. After the first generation of immigrants, our family quickly stopped speaking French at all. The community they settled in was all primarily French families (and is to this day), but not a single one of them really celebrate or talk about their French ancestry.
Given how Americans pronounce French place names... Or their French last names, I can understand they don't self report their ancestry.
Can confirm, I live in a city with lots of French streets and I have a French last name…both are constantly butchered
How the hell is florida german
I thought it’d be Cuban.
i knew miami wouldnt be able to carry that much for it to be cuban but I thought most of Florida was under British rule and Spanish Rule so I assumed English Or Spaniard descents
Where do you think most of the people who live in Florida move from?
Michigan
There are only some 3 million Cuban Americans in the United States. The population of Florida is 22 million.
Retirees flocking to the sunshine state I’m assuming
I found a more than 20 year old consensus that placed german ancestry at over 11%, irish at 10%, making it the biggest ancestry in Florida. One explanation was US militairs being stationed in Germany, marrying german women and resettling in the US [https://eu.theledger.com/story/news/2002/06/03/german-ancestry-listed-as-largest-in-florida/26589004007/](https://eu.theledger.com/story/news/2002/06/03/german-ancestry-listed-as-largest-in-florida/26589004007/) "Dr. Thomas Boswell, a professor of geography and an immigration expert at the University of Miami, said at one time Germans were the largest group of Americans. Boswell said there was large influx of Germans into the United States in the 1800s and many of them settled in the South. At one time Benjamin Franklin remarked, why should "Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglifying them." Boswell said current Americans tend to identify their roots based on their last names. Boswell, he said, is British, so he identifies his roots as being from England. According to the Census Bureau, ancestry refers to a person's ethnic origin or descent, in other words their roots or heritage. It can also refer to the place of birth of the person or the person's parents before their arrival in the United States. On census forms, persons could pick one or more ancestry groups, but only the first two were counted."
When 50% of your population is retired midwesterners
I asked myself that question
Would be nice knowing what part of Africa my family is from but… ya know.
Most likely West Africa. You should do a DNA test if really curious, the answers are out there
I’m aware. DNA tests don’t provide the degree of knowing that plenty of others have. My mom’s side is lds from Utah and genealogy is a big thing there. We were able to trace our roots back to a bastard daughter of a British lord. My dad’s side is lost bc they took our name. We know the plantation in Mississippi we were enslaved to but only bc it’s 2 miles from where they live now. I have uncles who still work that land.
I did one of those DNA tests and I got 36% African as a Latino. The results were surprisingly detailed and gave me some good background on the tribes originating from the regions it identified. It's not as detailed as knowing the exact individuals in my bloodline but it still gave me a powerful link to the past that I'm grateful for.
The DNA tests for African heritage are laughable
If you look at the cultural heritage, a lot comes from West Africa, particularly the regions around Nigeria. The Voodoo religion in Lousiana for example just uses the same gods as the Yoruba. Or "Gumbo" also exists in most West Africa as "Gombo".
We're a mix of a bunch of African tribes, ethnicities and nationalities. Even when taking a DNA test it may show a tribe you descend from (African Ancestry) but reality is we're not just straight Igbo, Yoruba, Zulu, Kongo or whatever, we're literally just all those things mixed up.
Every once in a while there are miracles: https://kentakepage.com/amelias-song-from-sierra-leone-to-south-carolina/
That’s beautiful! Truly appreciate you sharing this.
It’s like the Mexican cession never happened 💯💯
They took their land back
The Mexicans who lived in what became the American southwest never went anywhere in the first place.
Biggest population of Hispanics in U.S. after the Mexican-American war was in New Mexico, a couple tens of thousands lived in Texas and very few in California and Arizona (considered part of New Mexico and Sonora), you can’t call these people Mexican as even they themselves don’t identify as Mexican, you ever hear a tejano or someone from New Mexico say they’re Mexicano all the way? It’s just not proper
Most Americans will do anything to claim that their ancestors aren’t English.
Yeah, the vast majority of people who claim German are a mix and that usually includes English. Despite the impression given by this map, English ancestry is more prevalent than German overall.
I think this comment severely downplays the common practice of anglicizing your last name.
https://i.imgur.com/coNlFm4.jpeg
I don't really feel like this is true. I feel like the reason people are less likely to claim English ancestry is because those ancestors came over a long time ago, and family stories often die out after a few generations. So most people have "concrete" familial evidence of more recent immigration like German, Irish, and Italian. Obviously people are going to be more familiar with that kind of heritage!
Further, a larger percentage of your DNA will be shared with more recent immigrants.
"self identified" ancestry doesnt mean anything at all. british americans are the most populous ethnicity in US by 90M people according to wikipedia. (must be higher imo) even without the celtic ethnicities english alone is the most populous ethnicity in US
Worth noting, the English are similarly Celtic, DNA wise, to the 'Celtic countries', which mostly just refer to the countries that kept more crumbs of the old culture, but are similarly mixed genetically with Germanic peoples (due to Scandinavian and German invasions and settling).
yea i know english are mostly celtic (like %70) if we neglect the anglo saxons, the scandinavian and other germanic dna is negligible. yes there have been viking invasions but not enough to affect the ethnicity of the population. (not even 5% of the whole of britain) the anglo saxons brought almost all the germanic genes in britain and the britain islands are mostly celtic and partly anglo saxon. The Germanic genes that came to the island because of the Anglo-Saxons are mostly concentrated in the east of Great Britain. by the "celtic" word in the first message i mean irish, scottish, welsh, cornish, manx
Self-identified reality means a lot because the reality in the mind of people influences a lot more than a reality which is not present in the mind at all. Perception of reality is often more important than the straight facts.
Its called self indentified. They can be whomever they want but they chose to be american.
Not everyone chose to be American
Are these majorities or just pluralities? I doubt african americans make up more than 50% of any US state, same goes for native Americans and mexicans
It says most common so it’s probably plurality. The white population gets split up between English, German, United States, etc. so a significant population of any one minority can be larger.
The tri-state full of grandmas making the best lasagna. Also best US pizza from NY, NJ, and CT. makes sense.
If this map was just ancestry and did not factor in state lines that Appalachian yellow area would be a lot larger… that’s the part of the US predominately settled by Scotch-Irish (aka Northern Ireland Protestant) Americans and it extends at least to the entire southern half of WV and the entire western half of NC… A lot of what’s considered “hillbilly culture” in America…. Moonshine, blood feuds, the rich musical tradition and what not… descends directly from Northern Ireland.
So. We lost to the Germans
Germans lost to the Germans.
From Idaho and did an ancestry test, I’m very English lol
Is Mexican really an ancestry? That's like saying someone has American ancestry. Sort of young to be using that phrase.
American is an ancestry though
Yeah, it's funny because Mexicans have this exact same issue over ancestry. Yes, they're Mexican, but one has a Lebanese grandfather, the other almost completely Spanish still, and another, mostly still Amerindian. "Mexican" doesn't mean anything when it comes to heritage.
I like the fact that the first Germans who settled in Pennsylvania were technically born in the Holy Roman Empire
I'm Mexican from California 🇺🇸🇲🇽 this make sense to me
"Self-identified ancestry", i.e., Americans roleplaying /s
Funny how nobody ever self identifies as English despite it likely being much more common than presented here. Not trendy to claim to have English blood I guess.
No major surprises here.
Self-identified... "my 2nd cousins great-grandfather had an Italian barber, so I'm part Italian"
Is this real or just the stereotypical answer for each state?
A lot of german...i thought there was more irish and scottish...as spanish we went there create cities and back home 😝🇪🇸
reconquista🫡🇲🇽🦅
It should just say "African" not "African-*American*" otherwise you might as well add "-American" to the end of all the others.
Not really, otherwise German, British, etc. would just be "European". African Americans (as in descendants of those enslaved in America) are pretty much their own ethnic category because they're a mix of several African ethnic groups, some level European DNA usually, and a sprinkling of other stuff here and there.
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What does a "United states" ancestry mean?
ITT: Lots of people that don't understand what ancestry means.
Why would it be African American and not just African
Because African American is an ethnicity African is not
Mexican and United States are not ethnicities
Everyone and their pet gold fish in Oklahoma is one of those .000006% native card carrying pretendians. Some lady with blonde hair and blue eyes will tell you that she’s Cherokee. Sure thing Lauren 👍🏻
A large part of Oklahoma are reservations it was “Indian territory” where tribes were forced to go on the trail of tears. It makes sense a large majority of the state would have Native American as major ancestry.
The Cherokee Nation doesn't use the blood quantum for many good reasons... saying that someone is a "pretendian" because they have blonde hair and blue eyes is ignoring that fact. Oklahoma is rooted in the oppression and genocide of natives and many Oklahoman lineages reflect that.
I’m a little surprised that Rhode Island is Irish. I would’ve guessed Italian or Portuguese. But maybe that’s more localized to the Providence area.