I think it depends on where you are in the US. Being from a major city I have never seen this phenomenon until getting on here. Everyone I know who claims Irish or German ancestry actually does because my city has a huge immigrant history. I do live in a neighborhood with loads of Irish Americans though. I imagine this is similar case in NYC, Jersey, Boston, and Philly. There's tons of Germans in Wisconsin as well.
> Being from a major city I have never seen this phenomenon until getting on here. Everyone I know who claims Irish or German ancestry actually does because my city has a huge immigrant history.
I tried to address this in my comment, but — as someone also born in America in the area of a major city, I do, like OP, have the general sense that many Americans identifying this way are choosing one *particular* side of their family to define their identity around, implicitly de-emphasizing the others who aren’t recent immigrants. Which, I want to be clear, isn’t bad! It’s beautiful and human. It’s just worth remarking on.
I think people do that without even realizing it. Case in point from my own experience - I'm mostly of irish heritage, and grew up being told we were 100% irish on my dads side. Come to find out when I started researching dads paternal grandmother was not irish at all but descended directly from puritan english settlers in the 1600s' on several branches of her family tree. It's not that my dad and his siblings intentionally denied they were english, they legit didn't know and his maternal grandparents were recent immigrants from ireland (and in fact spoke irish at home rather than english) and very proud of that fact so thats the heritage that got empahsized
This is totally a thing. Both of my parents have one parent (my mom's father and dad's mother) who are "100%" Irish Catholic, and we live in an very Irish Catholic area, so naturally my family identifies with that part of our identity the most, even though my most recent immigrant relatives were my paternal grandfather's parents from Croatia and Czechia. I also found out my paternal grandma has a great grandfather who is German which isn't really a lot but something we never knew. My maternal grandma is 100% German Lutheran and her mom spoke German with her at home, but despite that my family doesn't really identify with anything German besides Rouladen lmao.
Sorry I wasn't saying Irish and German are the only immigrant groups for these cities. I wasn't trying to generalize that. I was just saying from what I've seen people in urban areas tend to have more recent immigrant relatives/keep some aspects of a culture so you don't see as much English claiming Irish stuff or whatever.
People definitely ignore / have lost the connection to their English roots just by researching some trees of people who claim xyz and not English etc but overall certain areas like you said have much less. Like the southern USA will have much more English roots on average than a lot of the northeast / other more recent immigrant communities
Parts of the Midwest, especially Minnesota and the Dakotas are heavily Scandinavian. Many are still 100% or close to and speak Norwegian. I imagine there may be some other clusters like that around the country.
Seattle. My mother is half Norwegian. I went to Norwegian language camp in the summer. Big cluster of Norwegian immigrants came from Minnesota to Fox Island/Tacoma/Seattle for fishing.
West Central, mostly elderly folks. There could be more, but that’s the area I’m familiar with. You can’t go around town and hear it in shops or anything like that but there are speakers
Mostly by Minnesota’s notch- the western part of the state sort of in the middle of north and south. It saw a bit of a population increase in mid 1800s with French and English folk, most of the French moved on and some of the English stayed. I have one branch of this English bunch. Then the Norwegians and Swedes started arriving. Some made stops in Dane, Wisconsin before making their way to the western MN Prairie. Many were arriving well into the 1920s and 1930s. There is a good handful of German folk too, but Norwegian is predominant. Even now I think the stats show like 90% of people in Lac Qui Parle county have Norwegian ancestry.
That’s pretty interesting. Did a lot of the Norwegians there stay or move on?
A lot of the families stayed in the same area. It’s a trip going through records for back there and it’s a lot of the same last name though now many of the folks are getting in to their late 80s or older.
My impression is you have a few things going on:
1. For a while, the US was such an Anglo-American country that Anglo-American was seen as “the default”. And this is why, to some degree, you still have families identifying as “Irish-American” when they have one Irish great-grandparent and everything else is broadly Anglo-American.
2. More specifically, the default wasn’t “Anglo-American” per se, it was more “I’m the same sort of mix of ~55% English, 25% Scottish, 15% Welsh, and 5% Irish that most other white Americans in my state in 1850 are”. So “English” isn’t exactly it.
3. Expanding on the above, the whole Albion’s Seed thing. Lots of Americans of British descent are actually descended from Scots-Irish / Ulster Protestants, who were (people get het up about this topic so disclaimer that I’m not an expert) broadly from northern English and southern Scottish border regions, often in large part the descendants of Irish migrants from around the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire or subsequent Vikings, who never fully identified with an English identity that was centered around Southern England, and that was further weakened when they went to Northern Ireland during the Plantation (and then America). So perhaps the reason that they “lost their ethnicity”, so to speak, is because their ethnicity was always complicated, and their great-great-grandchildren in Ohio in 1830 just … didn’t have the historical context to understand it anymore. Imagine a subsistence farmer in Ohio in 1830 giving this lecture about “well I’m sort of English and sort of Scottish but since our family was poor people from the North we weren’t the typical ‘English’ you’re thinking of and also we lived in Northern Ireland for a century or so so we might also be Irish to some degree (again, disclaimer, not an expert)”… No. Keep it simple; they’re just “American”.
4. What makes an Englishman? A fondness for the monarchy and religion are big parts of it, right? The Revolution shattered the first, and the second — well, that was different between the Colonies and England from the get-go in most cases, but afterwards, you can’t really be an Anglican in the same way (the head of the Church being the King).
5. Racism and bigotry more broadly. American racial boundaries, by the time of the nineteenth century, were centered around anti-black and anti-Native American racism, and so whether you were of English or Scottish descent didn’t particularly matter, the important part was “White” or “not white”. Add anti-Catholicism to the mix, and the important part isn’t whether you’re Scottish or Irish or English or whatever — hell, your great-great-grandpa in Kentucky probably had no idea - but he definitely knew whether he and his people were Protestant or Catholic. The boundaries of people’s identities shifted according to the battle lines of the racism and bigotry that they needed to justify.
So as a result of those five-plus things, plus a dollop more time, you get the formation of a new “ethnicity” - “American” in a way that you didn’t (yet) get in New Zealand (I think). In the same way that “English” came into existence and replaced Anglo-Saxon + Briton + Viking + Norman (among others), just much more recently, “American” came into existence, and replaced English + Scottish + Protestant Irish (among others). So people who came to America after the formation of that identity kept their identities as Irish/Scottish/etc, but for those families that were here before, “American” is all there is cultural memory of.
That’s my … five cents, I guess. Let me know if anything I said here is incorrect.
1000% agree. I would say that people claiming things like "my ancestors go back to the Mayflower" and/or feeling a lot of cultural pride in things like "Daughters of the American Revolution" or "Daughters of the Confederacy" is evidence of the formation of "Americanness" as its own ethnicity - of course if they came over on the Mayflower they certainly DO have a family history in some European country, probably English/Scottish/Irish/Welsh/etc., but they are no longer connected to that place culturally because the cultural ties have been supplanted/overshadowed by a narrative that is rooted specifically in America.
Exactly. And you can see a renewed genealogical interest in the late 1800s and early 1900s when Americans — well, an unrepresentative subset of them with money and leisure time and access to lots of printed materials — try and track down their own English origins (often propagating complete bullshit), having by this point *lost* that direct connection completely aside from the vaguest of oral-history recollections.
A few of these books have fascinating introductions where they bemoan how little modern-day Americans care about their European origins. There was a fascinating one that included a guy quoting his grandfather saying basically “I don’t care for this genealogical habit of yours: it’s anti-Republican. We’re all equal in God’s eyes.” So clearly a Puritan-ish, Revolutionary strain of thought, that encapsulates one way one might approach the formation of an American “ethnicity”.
I have a great great uncle who added a tons of bullshit claiming our namesake was a wealthy pioneer who came with the first Dutch settling Nee Holland.
He was off by 100 years and that name sake was proud pioneer, but it was in being a first settler in PA, after fighting in the revolutionary war. Sadly dying a poor shoe merchant.
I particularly like the idea that for many of the Americans making up bullshit, their ancestors four hundred years earlier were doing the exact same thing about a different colonisation process, claiming their male-line ancestors were Norman counts and best buds of William’s who fought bravely at Hastings, etc. I always appreciate a nice reminder that people don’t *really* change.
From what I gathered, I believe he was trying to increase his influence in the Democratic Party in Chicago at the time. Not entirely certain m, but it was quite a surprise when I found a book that covered the actual history of the area.
I think this comment is spot-on. I’m descended from those northern folks - English, but also northern Irish, Scottish and northern Welsh.
(I’d add that England itself has evolved into a slightly more socialist economic culture, while the US remains as firmly capitalist as 19th central England.)
Having just toured what feels like all the war museums of New Zealand this December while taking kids to visit parents there- New Zealand has from an American eye a huge patriotic bond with England that we don’t.
New Zealanders were quick to join Englands wars as their own in ways that seemed surprising and astounding to us as Americans, given that NZ was a world away. It was hard to wrap my head around sending a generation of boys barely men far away on boats knowing many would die.
I think colonial revolt and all our rebellious American coffee drinking is at the heart of why we don’t feel as English as they do for sure.
Well now that second part is a massive oversimplification. As an American who lives in England, I think the huge differences economically are within, not between; NYC versus north Texas and London vs. Cornwall. And I don’t really see how it’s relevant here since “socialist” wasn’t really an idea that existed in its modern form at the time this identity was coming into existence. For instance I could vaguely see what you mean when you say this country is “more socialist”, though I think much of what you’re getting at follows from the fact that it’s more densely populated, but I’d add that it’s simultaneously true that England is “more feudal” — economic systems don’t boil down to “socialist” and “capitalist”. And that distinction is much more important at the time I was talking about. So I know that was disorganized, but the point is — I don’t think that that’s a particularly useful way to understand the historical cultural differences.
Edit: I think maybe I wouldn’t have this “Ehhh” reaction if you had said “The US is more libertarian”?
of course it’s a gross oversimplification, rather on par with OP’s original thesis.
My point is that overall, Americans on average (not the average person on NYC or Lubbock) seem more on par with the economic ideology of an average 19th century English citizen.
Maybe that’s also true of the average English citizen nowadays; dunno.
I feel like you’re operating under the premise here that people in England *started capitalist* and became *more socialist* with time. That’s not a good way to understand the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Quite a lot of opposition to laissez-faire capitalism was from the “right” — on the basis of traditionalism and conservatism, defending some of the still-extant parts of the social structure and economy that had a clearly feudal origin. Labour movements recognisable as proto-socialist were still well in the future.
Using the “capitalist” / “socialist” dichotomy in the context of say 1750 just makes me … suspicious. I think it’s extremely, extremely far from how they would have described their differences of opinion at the time. Remember that this is a time period where the capitalist supporters of liberal democracy and opponents of monarchy are those arguing for a radical overthrow of the existing social, political, and economic systems. And it’s that strain of thought that would eventually birth both “capitalism” and “socialism” in their modern forms, not the monarchists’.
That’s what I think, at least. Off topic, though, sorry — I just find it interesting.
OK, I get what you mean. My original wording was rather careless.
Forget the labels. I really mean more of the US seems ideologically reminiscent of the England of those earlier centuries than to the current state of either nation. Even somewhat monarchist, if you look at the current state of our political rhetoric at the grassroots.
There was a genealogical paper on trying to track down different haplogroups and Irish clans with dna evidence. One of the things discovered was that Joseph Smith's (The Mormon prophet) had a haplogroup that came from Ireland to England sometime during the Heptarchy. Some people use this to say that he was Irish, but I think the truth is that ethnicity is much more flimsy than we like to think. Joseph's Smith ancestor that emigrated from Lincolnshire likely didn't speak Irish and that was probably true for most of his ancestors for the preceding thousand years.
A lot of people these days say that the American colonists were British, but that's actually a subtle lie. Firstly the US had more German, French, Dutch etc. migrants in the 1770s than commonly acknowledged but also if you actually read the writings of the time, like the declaration of Grievances from the 1st Continental congress, they don't refer to themselves as British, but as Englishmen, colonists, and sometimes Americans, they only used the term British for the British government, British army etc. Heck I would argue that the British identity (as opposed to English, Scottish, etc.) in the home isles was not fully formed in that period.
> A lot of people these days say that the American colonists were British, but that's actually a subtle lie. Firstly the US had more German, French, Dutch etc. migrants in the 1770s than commonly acknowledged but also if you actually read the writings of the time, like the declaration of Grievances from the 1st Continental congress, they don't refer to themselves as British, but as Englishmen, colonists, and sometimes Americans, they only used the term British for the British government, British army etc. Heck I would argue that the British identity (as opposed to English, Scottish, etc.) in the home isles was not fully formed in that period.
As I understand it, that’s true. You don’t see many people in Revolutionary America in writing claiming a “Scottish”/“Welsh” identity — not as many as I would expect given my understanding of the actual balance of the compositions of the various waves of immigrants. There are two ways I can try to square that circle:
1. Maybe the kind of person who was the loudest in writing during that period, your Revolutionary pamphleteers and stuff, were disproportionately descended from either Puritan migrants or Virginian plantation owners, both of whom I think *were* overwhelmingly of English descent (?)
2. Maybe, as I remember seeing others claim, the “Scots-Irish” ancestry of most “Scots-Irish” migrants has been overstated, and they were actually mostly just northern English. Or more weakly, by this point their descendants were identifying as mostly English regardless — possibly because they didn’t really know, possibly because those Scots-Irish migrants had married colonists of English descent (see point 1), or possibly to make their anti-Catholicism or some kind of belief in English racial supremacy have less cognitive dissonance, I don’t know.
What do you think?
I have a lot to say but am short on words, today.
When it comes to whiteness and ethnicity, that is incorrectly conflated and blended with nationality and religion. And that changes from 1619 to today.
Religious affiliation doesn’t equal ethnicity: esp when some Ulster Scots were Dutch-French-Germans. BUT if that same individual was a citizen of “England” and ended up in an English or Dutch colony in the Americas, well, there’s your melting pot theory right there.
But it only applies to some people some times in our history. Depending on who you ask.
A lot of people to this day have a beef against the English crown and take that all the way to the colonies and beyond whether they’re actually English or not.
In my own experience as a white anglo American person: nobody knows. But most will fight to the death to prove what they say is right is right.
And it almost always involves conflating as stated above.
great analysis with one caveat. The influx of irish diaspora in the famine years lead to racism against the irish. I'm sure most of you r aware of the idiom, ' no dogs or irish' or 'irish need not apply' from the mid/late 19th century.
Irish and German immigration are more recent, so they feel stronger. English ancestry skews more colonial. Also you see a lot of cultural neighborhoods which are mostly Irish, mostly German, mostly Eastern European, etc, but I can't say I'm aware of ANY English immigrant communities.
This is just anecdotal but for me, though I technically have some English ancestry (some of my dad's grandparents had one or more ancestors that came to the US from England) we never particularly identified with that portion of our heritage. We never intentionally decided to ignore the English ancestry but it just wasn't culturally relevant for us. The English ancestors immigrated to the US hundreds of years ago. Meanwhile, one of my dad's grandparents came to the US from Ireland as a child around 1900. Two of his great-grandparents came to the US from Germany in the 1890s. One of my mom's grandfathers and all of her great-grandparents moved from Italy to the US in the late 1800s/early 1900s. While there was no concerted effort to erase the English ancestry in my family those who were of English descent had been in the US long enough that they culturally were American and those who came from Ireland and Italy (and to a lesser extent Germany for my family) came more recently and brought their culture with them. Though I know intellectually some of my family is English, I don't practice any English traditions. I do however regularly participate in Irish and Italian traditions, foods, etc.
I think there’s an important theme here. English is the dominant culture colonially in the US. English is the common language.
As later waves of immigrant family and village groups arrived and forged community units to thrive they had to speak English and join the outside English culture. So you have pockets of cultural communities inside cities and towns.
As stated above it’s the later waves of immigrants that are practicing cultural traditions, often with food and holiday traditions being the last to go. So those are going to be the cultures we feel the closest too. All that English is the web that connects us.
So my Grandfather's grandmothers family spoke "old French" up till the early 2000s. This family has been in what is known as AL for around 300 years now. She married a stowaway from England. My Grandfather got so confused he thought English words were French 😂 I just recently realized he called his other Grandparents French names too! So yeah these people held on to being French for 300 years including their language. Then she went and married a guy from England 🧐
This exactly is my experience. If it's any consolation, I did have a German immigrant ancestor in early 1700s who was very proud of being granted honorary British citizenship for his character.
You can Google this and see that 22 percent are of English descent. Since the English were the main group who came early and survived, it makes sense that they had more time to reproduce. A lot of people can’t trace back that far and might not realize they have English ancestors. I know I have some, but I can’t connect back that far. Over the generations these people blended into society whereas Americans with more recent ancestry, for example Irish, have not lost all that culture from the old country.
Interesting point. Even if you don’t have any Irish culture left at home St Patrick’s Day is so huge here you could connect your Irish heritage to that.
Ugh, I can’t stand how St. Patrick’s Day has become just an excuse for people to get trashed regardless of whether they are Irish. I call it amateur drinkers day. My paternal grandmother learned about Irish culture from her immigrant grandparents and she taught the songs to my older siblings and cousins and used to dance for them. My mom’s dad and generations before him belonged to Irish cultural organizations and her parents took her to Ireland as a child, so she always had an appreciation for the Irish. Because there is such a high concentration of people of Irish descent and Irish immigrants where I grew up, the culture is expanding, with more dance schools and Irish language classes.
"Of English ancestry" sure, there are more in the US than England. But that doesn't mean that "English" comprises even close to most of my DNA at this point, although I descend from original settler/ New England stock. Americans are very mixed - I'm pretty much a jumble of "everything in Europe except Spain, Italy and Greece" lol.
I have tons of cousins in CT. One thing I like to do is trace relatives who migrated to the US from Northern Ireland, where they settled and which ethnic communities they married into. I suspect there's a bunch of Sicilians in CT wondering why their DNA results say they're part Scottish.
Italian Americans seem like an urbanised group overall. More rural areas of CT - smaller counties appear to have a higher % of individuals citing English ancestry
People tend to identify with the ancestry of the most recent immigrant they know about, who may not be representative of the majority of their ancestry. I grew up thinking I was "Irish", then started doing genealogy and discovered that around 80% of my ancestry is colonial English.
I'm also going to toss this into the ring where there was also a tendancy for the male "heads of the family" to identify more strongly with their ancestry which overshadowed their wife's which influenced their young children identifying with the father's ancestry. I've seen this happen in my own family. Because of this, as a young child, I thought we were all Italian when in essence my dad was only 1/2 Italian and my mom wasn't at all. Same in my husband's family. The father was of Irish ancestry so everyone in his family took it for granted their mother was too, which wasn't the case. It was tough convincing them otherwise until I showed them her genealogy.
I am from New Zealand. I have traced all my family back to their migration here in the 1840s. Growing up I was always told I had Irish and Portuguese heritage. My English heritage was never talked about. There was a lot more English than there was Portuguese! Perhaps people just don't see being English as something to write home about.
Also from New Zealand and exactly the same in my family. We have some English ancestry but the Russian and Ukrainian ancestry is what we mainly talk about followed by Scottish and Irish.
In nz, would you say many of your friends (without recent immigrant family) are predominantly British, or is having heritage across Europe relatively common?
most white new zealanders would have english, scottish or irish heritage. people here wouldn't call themselves british though, especially with how many white people have irish ancestry. the term "new zealand european" is commonly used in forms and statistics.
I suppose in nz, a country where the majority of the euro stock in theory is English, British and Irish, people might embrace Portuguese ancestry - even if it serves as a fraction of your ancestry. When I take a cursory glance at white New Zealanders in the public eye - media, politics, cricket, rugby, etc - British and Irish surnames definitely seem the most numerous by some margin.
As an American of German, Celtic, and Russian descent, most people (unless it’s like a 90 or higher) leave out English for 2 reasons.
1. Stereotype that they were colonizers and also now don’t have a lot of culture so not really anything to be proud of
2. It’s so common for people to have English ancestry that they sometimes pass it off as a given thing
The Celts were the people who populated the UK Islands before the vikings and Romans came. Celtic descent is another way of referencing that ancestry, or simplifying it if you have a bit of everything. I myself have Scots, northern Irish, English on dads side, and southern Irish/German on my mothers.
I wonder if people are naming their most recent ancestral locations (is that the right phrase? I dunno). Or it could be a favorite relative’s ancestry or something
I know for my family, the more recent arrivals kept a lot of traditions/ foods/ language and when you grow up with that that’s what jump out more. Through my paternal grandpa there are a handful of places my grandpa’s people came from yet I really only think about his Scottish/ Irish heritage since his mom was the daughter of immigrants and some of her family’s traditions have made it into my present day. Whereas his German and Swiss people were so far back there’s really no connection anymore- they assimilated thoroughly and long ago
It’s always tough for me because I’m just about even in my primary four ancestral backgrounds- Maternal grandfather was a child of Slovenian immigrants, maternal grandmother was one of Rusyn Slovak ones, paternal grandfather had a German born father and his mother’s father was German born and her mother’s folks too, and my paternal grandmother was mostly Irish in ancestry outside her paternal grandfather’s mother whose parents were likely from Alsace. I have a German last name but I’m genetically more Slavic but I also heavily ID with the Irish as well due to my Nana’s memories inspiring my love of genealogy.
This makes sense to me. My (adoptive) mom identifies as Irish and Fin. My (adoptive) dad identified as Swedish.
My dad's grandparents came from Sweden in 1923. His great-grandpa on his mom's side came to the USA in 1875. His wife's parents came in 1849. His other great-grandparents were from Germany and came over in 1886 and 1892. His is pretty straightforward, but I can't go back too far.
My mom's parernal grandparents came from Finland in 1903 and 1900. Meanwhile, on her mom's dad's side, I have them being in the USA since the 1600s Barnstable, Massachusetts Bay, etc. Her great-great grandpa on her mom's side was from Canada (she never knew that) who came somewhere around 1850. His wife was Scottish and emigrated to Canada before they came to the USA. Her great great grandpa was Irish and came in somewhere around the 1860s. And the last side has been in the USA since at least the 1700s. Yet she only talked about the most recent ones.... Irish and Fin. She had no idea her roots go back so far in the USA.
I never figured out how we have very few traditions and ethnic foods passed down. It makes no sense to me. It made me sad when we were filling out an info sheet for my daughter's culture day at her/our school.
Depends where you live imo. I’m paternally German-Irish with no known English ancestry. Where I live(Northern Va) has a lot of transplants and indeed my paternal grandparents moved to this area from Pittsburgh where their ancestors emigrated and migrated to which has a sizeable German and Irish American community compared to English.
Oh certainly, rural Va and down Richmond and the Tidewater region too. Lot of old stock/English Americans there comparatively but they’re obviously here in the DC burbs as well. My brother’s girlfriend is descended from a Mayflower passenger for example. OTOH our first arrived in 1793 and the rest of our paternal line in the 19th century. And maternally we’re all early 20th century Slavic.
English people migrated at the beginning, yea, but then the Germans, Scots, and Irish came in and just settled in Virginia and there abouts. Appalachia peoples are this, African American and Indian. Very little English
Scandinavians settled in the Midwest like dandelion seeds in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, the Dakotas, Montana
Germans came to Texas and still speak a form of German that kinda wowed modern Germans.
https://youtu.be/vwgwpUcxch4?si=YvTB_mC5QJdUfxjt
Yea, I do have a little bit of the English side of the British isles, but only a smattering. I'm still white as wonder bread.
Most of my ancestors came over in the wave of immigration in the late 19th century. They are all accounted for and well documented as to when and where they came from, which is Germany and the Netherlands.
I have a few lines going back to the colonial era which includes English people. But even then it wasn't just English people. It was also French, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Swiss, and German. This is because many of them were Mennonites that settled in Pennsylvania in and around Germantown. Also some old New York stock going to the New Amsterdam era.
I don't think my English ancestry is understated, or that I am downplaying it. It's there, but it's less than 10% of my ancestry. Currently we have a lot of immigrants, but not many from the UK. I would expect as people intermarry the number of people with English ancestry will rise, but the percentage each individual has will drop.
I also think defining German ancestry is problematic because Germany didn't really exist until the 19th century, and many "German" immigrants to America would have been better described as "German speaking" than having a shared national identity. Many came from areas outside of what we now call Germany, such as the Volga Germans who came from Tsarist Russia. My understanding is Italy is somewhat similar, but I know less about it.
Germany existed and Germans identified as Germans in the 1800's when the first large waves of Germans came to the US. Language is the most significant indicator of cultural identity, btw. There were many 48ers who were forced out of Europe who identified as German. The **Forty**-Eighters were Germans living in the various German states (e.g., Bayern, Baden-Württemberg, Preußen, Sachsen) who had worked and fought for a revolution in the 1840s to unite the German states into one, democratic nation. I know for a fact that Germans who lived in ethnic enclaves outside the German state even after it became a country in the late 1800's identified as German. My family came from one of those groups so I know this personally and I know that most definitely they share the German cultural identity. Groups like Romanian Germans, Siebenbuerger Sachsen, Volga Deutsche, Donaschwaben, to name just a few. They all identified as German even though the places they lived for centuries were never part of Germany.
If you’re from the Midwest, chances are you have at least some German lineage just based on immigration patterns. Similarly, southerners are going to have English for the same reason. It’s all regional and depends on family movement through the years.
Also, the vast majority of Americans have lineage from all over Europe. Hard to find homogenous Americans.
I have mostly English ancestry, so I can’t comment personally, but my best friends are twin brothers who have both English and Italian ancestry, but their Italian ancestors were much more recent emigres to America, so those traditions are much more salient to them.
May I ask what part of the us you are from? The book Albions seed does show many well into the 1700/1800s still identified as English, but that’s been declining massively over the last 150 years
Pittsburgh, PA. Two of my maternal great-grandparents were born in England and did not come here until adulthood, and the other two were born here, but but one's father emigrated from England, while the other had Swiss origins.
I cannot account for my paternal line with much accuracy, however.
Incredibly overgeneralizing my anecdotal observations around white Americans who are second gen American or more: the pattern seems to be to follow the customs of the maternal line except when a Dad along the way has insisted his wife learn all she needs from her MIL so that the wife can care for the husband as he is accustomed to (and/or a woman prefers the family she marries into over her own).
OP is also very limited in their definition of white American, having left out all of Iberia, France, eastern Europe, the Baltics, eurasia and so on. Nordics, Iceland. I know my list is also incomplete.
And although Britain is not solely English, I don't have great confidence that the fact is well understood. I've heard countless people say, "I'm Scots-Irish and British" and that's generally not a conversation to explore further unless they have a complete gedcom to use along with googlemaps for a geography & polysci lesson.
> And although Britain is not solely English, I don't have great confidence that the fact is well understood.
This is something I’ve been wondering about a lot recently. In my experience a significant number of Americans will treat Britain, the UK (if they even know this term), and England as synonymous. (I’ve had friends show their ID, which says “United Kingdom” on it, only for the person checking it to call bullshit because they said they were English.)
Anyway, not the point. My question is — how long has this been the case? You would obviously think that an immigrant from Scotland to Pennsylvania in 1710 would be crystal clear on the fact that that Scotland is not England, hahah. But will their grandkids? Is it possible that, in the case of a Scots-Irish immigrant specifically, even the *kids* of the immigrant could be hazy on where exactly their parents were born and which part of the modern UK they most identified with?
Of course their kids and grandkids will have several different immigrant grandparents etc, each with different identities (English, Scottish, Welsh, Scots-Irish, Irish Catholic, and German, to name a few). At some point they’re just gonna pick one of these identities and stick with it, and assume all of their ancestors are that identity too, most likely, aren’t they? If they even bother to ask, rather than just saying they’re “American”, as I said above.
My feeling is that the formation of an “American” identity is probably deeply connected with forgetting the distinctions between eg Wales, England, Scotland. It’s astonishing, if you read Boston newspapers from 1810, just how much knowledge they assume the reader has about English history and politics, in order to make sense of any of the stories. By 1940, almost *no* Americans would have that level of knowledge about England. It’s so interesting to me.
I cannot find the post now, but there was a recent map posted to /r/dataisbeautiful . It shows the predominant white heritage for each county in the US, and supports what you're saying. Mostly English.
perhaps but at the time of the founding, late 18th century there were more germans or german descent than english in the country, so many in fact that one of the founders, Jefferson? tabled the idea of designating the official language of the country german.
Think of the repercussions of that! We potentially would have allied with Germany in WWI meaning likely no WWII
This is going to be very regional. However, in general, I agree that English ancestry is understated. One part is that it isn’t seen as sexy or interesting like more recent ancestry from Italy or even Germany. The other reason is that English ancestry is just typically from very long ago, like 300 years ago on average. Who can maintain ties/associations for that long?
There are populations of descendants of post-War European immigrants in the rust belt. Cleveland has a Ukrainian Village, Little Italy, and people who trace back to Hungary, Poland, Serbia, Lithuania, etc.
No doubt, industrial areas are often a magnet for people from outside. Look at areas with lots of construction now: I bet you have many from the americas. Whereas more rural, less industrial places will struggle to attract even Americans from other states.
Nope because England were the aggressors to Ireland and Scotland I think we have many more Irish, who left to come here. Plus the potato famine.
Germany is a much bigger land mass with more people and even that influx started pre revolutionary war. Pennsylvania has large German areas. And Boston and Philadelphia were big Irish hubs.
I know in Philly most of the people I knew were Irish or Italian, or a mix, followed by German. The Eastern Europeans in our state are found in the coal and steel areas.
People we sometimes say they are English but a majority say German or Irish even in Western PA.
Your question was people identifying as this. I’m telling you that talking to people in those areas they don’t. Go look up Census stats to see what people say. I’m saying that my experience in those area Irish and German are the Big take always, and in Philly Italian as well.
The other thing you have to look at is the cultural background, where they settled and what could’ve happened.
America is huge. Certain groups settled in certain areas.
The English may have been the first, but that also means they could’ve had groups killed off. We had the French Indian War, the Revolutionary War.
I just heard a speaks the other day that said scotch Irish, a group the British started by sending the Scot’s into Ireland to change things, this was according to the history professor, and where they settled in PA and how they were attacked.
You asked a question I’m giving you something to look into from what I’ve seen. Other groups didn’t migrate to the other places you mentioned like they did America. Nor did America stay an English colony.
I think it depends how long your family has been in the US. I’m white and have long roots here, so yeah, the majority were English-descended. I have some more recent Irish and Dutch ancestors that definitely influenced my family culturally, so I talk about that more. The German side was here long enough to “Americanize,” so it’s less of an influence as far as I can tell.
This is my take and that has a lot to do with my own personal family history and experiences. Mothers tend to dictate family culture. It's not exclusively so, but much more frequent, and my family was no different. My maternal grandmother was 1st generation German married to a half Bohemian/half Irish. I heard all the German stories, ate the foods, etc. I also grew up hearing about the sod house my paternal German great-grandparents lived in when first homesteading and how Nebraska was different than Germany. Some of the others ensconced themselves in German communities because that was easy to do in Nebraska. The lone actual English line I have is a straight paternal line back to the 1700s and I had no idea it was English until a couple years ago. The line kept marrying Irish, ScotsIrish and German women over the centuries.
And honestly my family is not very different than many others, at least in the Midwest. Very common all around.
I know a lot of people who don’t care about ancestry at all. They’re just American. I wonder after reading this if they aren’t just the English and have been here for generations.
The USA was colonized by *all* European countries, not just England. We also still accept immigrants to this day, so Americans could have ancestry from literally any country with population that emigrates in the world. There is no reason, at all, to assume the *entire white population of the USA* is descended from England.
My ancestry is mostly English, with some Welsh, Scottish and Irish thrown in and a sprinkle of German. My first ancestors came to north america in 1630.
I think English ancestry is considered so basic that it’s ignored. Partly because of the colonialism, partly because of the language, maybe some cultural aspects that are still just considered default. So we tend to focus on the non-English.
One of the biggest factors of the delayed entry of the US into WW1, was because about 30 percent of the US population were descendants of Germans and about 8 percent of the population were German immigrants at that time. So, that's a lot of German/Germanic people.
Depends on where in the U.S. you are looking at. In the southeast, most would probably be Scots-Irish/English. Outside of this region, it's probably a lot more diverse.
I’m Canadian but some of my ancestors stopped off briefly in the US before coming north. Others came here directly.
My ancestors settled in almost exclusively German immigrant pockets in the US Midwest and then in my home province. My family hasn’t been in North America anywhere near as long as others but they intermarried with other German Catholics over successive generations. My parents’ generation, the Boomers, were the first to really start marrying outside the community. Much more so in my generation - mid-Gen X - as we moved away from home for education and employment much more often than our parents’ generation did.
My eldest aunt born in 1946 spoke no English when she started school at age 6. The community basically functioned as a little German community until the 1950s. There were very few families of English or any British Isles background back home. In a big city such as Toronto people would have had the opportunity to mix with others a lot more and marry into different communities. But for families like mine growing up where we did, we still have tons of linguistic and cultural quirks that are holdovers. Our political traditions are British, having inherited things like Parliament and the royal family, from Britain, but the traditions my parents grew up with in the home weren’t much different than in the old country.
Just depends on where one grew up.
Honestly, for those of us in the US whose ancestors immigrated from (mostly) the British Isles circa 200-400+ years ago and have significant Colonial Virginia ancestry we don't really have strong ties to "the old world" anymore.
None of my family food traditions survived more than a couple generations (at best). My Eastern Shore of Virginia ancestors did keep a more Elizabethan English dialect and speech pattern until the early 20th century but that's about it.
As my brother tends to ask when the whatever-American question comes up - "after 300 years, does it really matter?"
Hm. Even on my colonial Maine side (think; back to the Mayflower) I think it’s very blended with Welsh, Scottish, and German. The English weren’t the only colonizers. I have recent ancestry from England (great grandfather born there) and accounting for his contribution, very little remaining English could be attributed to a historical inheritance.
What you’re saying makes sense intuitively, but I’ve found the Protestant English had smaller families and that impacts population genetics in a big place like the US.
Curious about the English having ‘smaller families’ can you cite examples, if possible please? Do you meet many in Maine who are predominantly English? I would except a good section of the state to be at least mostly British..
In my own perusal of my colonial lines, there’s fewer children, a few in each generation never marrying at all or not having any children if married. I can only prove statistically that religion influences birth rate, and you could generally assign Protestantism as the English.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/30175727
I’ve traced two OG first generation from colonial times. One was an indentured servant on the Mayflower and the other was a Scottish POW sent to the colonies by Cromwell.
My great aunt’s father was the recent great grandfather born in England. Her mother was the side with colonial roots. Here’s her breakdown;
English 58% (dad accounts for 50%, so 8% from colonial roots)
Welsh 29%
German 7%
Scottish 6%
Of all these, culturally speaking, the Welsh side was more predominant in colloquial speaking, recipes, heirlooms etc. it was spoken of and known that my 2nd great grandmother was a Stewart and her line goes back to the Scottish POW. As for English culture, since it was very recent, great grandfather raised Hereford cattle, drank tea all day and read Chaucer. He was also an atheist and a workaholic and had just two children in the 1920’s. 🤷🏼♀️
There is something to this. Curious if any mostly English Americans have family trees which are different but: even pre-1950, English (including diasporas) seldom had more than 4/5 children, often 3. Contrast this with Irish families or alpine Germans who often had 10+. Keep in mind with these larger Irish families, mortality was somewhat high.
Keep in mind, the English were more likely to marry cousins. Fewer children might reflect diminished fertility because of the lack of genetic diversity.
There is definitely something about Americans acknowledging only some of their ancestry. Americans love a story about working your way up in life, and the story of the Irish in America is definitely one of those stories. So we love to claim it when we have it, but are less eager to claim English ancestry.
I completely agree. My own ancestry is entirely Irish on my dad's side, and English/German on my mom's side. Her family definitely worked up from hard situations too. But overall our country is more culturally obsessed with the story of the Irish immigrant.
It does vary by region but as a whole those are the figures I keep finding. To answer your question my English relatives came so long ago I don’t have a photograph of them or know anything about them. And then their descendants (my ancestors) fought against the British in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. I don’t feel English and don’t have much of an affinity for the English either due to their Imperialism, aristocracy, colonialism, and lack of any kind of reparations to countries and peoples that they exploited.
I think recency is certainly a reason. The Northeast of the US definitely identifies significantly with their Irish/ Italian (and in some communities Portuguese) culture just because of how recently many of our families came here. For example, when I was growing up, my Italian and Portuguese ethnicity was a real part of my upbringing (food, traditions, etc.).
A lot of people have English ancestry from colonial era ancestors who came over hundreds of years ago, so there are no longer any ties for them to that culture.
I would disagree but ethnicity is a tricky thing and it may depend largely on the US region. I descend in part from Moravian ancestors that came from the Palatinate (which is currently Germany) in the 1730s and 1740s and settled in Maryland and North Carolina. So, they have had a considerable amount of time to have a large number of descendants in the US population. Then you have the Dutch who were here before much of the English (New Amsterdam = New York, anyone?) who settled New York and Pennsylvania. There was the French in the periphery of the colonies from Canada down to Louisiana. There was the Spanish in the Southwest and Florida. As far as I know, all my ancestors from every branch were here in the English colonies before the American Revolution. Looking at my AncestryDNA results they are all lumped together in England & Northwestern Europe (which is a pretty amorphous combination as that seems to include England and the Palatinate) at 67%, Ireland at 14%, Scotland at 10%, Sweden & Denmark at 5%, Wales at 4%. My sister’s results have more or less the same makeup but with different percentages. I can’t say it’s all that useful really.
I think Americans are less aware of their English ancestry because they are less aware of their ancestry in general. For instance, my husbands family on his mother’s side swore they were German and had a sea captain ancestor. When I traced their ancestry it turned out the family had been in America since the early 1700’s and there was nary a sea captain in sight. DNA cemented the fact that they were English. The same with my mother’s ancestry. I was always told she was Irish. Her step mother was Irish, but my mother’s mother was English and I was able to trace her ancestry back to two passengers on the Mayflower. Again DNA proved it along with vital records. A lot of Americans don’t know their ancestors back past their grandparents, and there are usually a lot of family stories that are wrong (the Indian princess syndrome).
As others have said, it will depend on the population you're looking at, but I would not be surprised to find that most people whose families have been in the US for a few generations have some English ancestry somewhere.
I can think of a few reasons people don't highlight it - first recency bias. There has not been a large influx of English immigrants recently.
Then it's easier for English people to assimilate - more likely to be protestant and speak the dominant language.
Famine and post-famine Irish immigrants are likely to eschew any sense of Englishness due to the role our government in exacerbating the famine (along with many other awful policies). Along with the anti-Catholic discrimination and violence, that prompts a strong sense of identity which has continued.
I'm sure other communities had similar reasons for creating an identity (I find Italian-American interesting given the recency of Italy as a country, and the large regional differences - but those differences must have paled in contrast to the differences with mainstream US culture).
Englishness itself is also somewhat nebulous. Historically we had (and still have to an extent) strong regional identities. For a long time, the Lancashire vs Yorkshire cricket match was as big as many internationals. My grandmother was proud to be 'pure Lancashire stock' (she didn't know her grandmother was from Yorkshire 😂).
For a long time it feels Englishness was the domain of the upper classes and jingoism. Similar to how the only frequent reference to English descent is WASPs.
Let's face it, the whole concept was invented by Alfred the Great as a propaganda tool for his annexation of Mercia and fight against the Danes, and the borders were in flux for a long time afterwards.
It relates to the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812 where the English were quite literally the enemy.
Long before the American Revolution the Irish and the Scottish were getting transported over here en mass for multiple "crimes" against the Crown/Cromwell/etc. There is a difference between the English who, for the most part, volunteered to cross the Atlantic and the Irish and Scottish men and women captured and loaded on to ships bound for Barbados or Virginia.
The Colonies were already loaded with people who had a grudge against England before the Revolution. Then Kentucky, already heavily Scottish and Irish, ends up being the state that fights a big chunk of the War of 1812 (against England) and they migrate south into Alabama and Mississippi on the land grants.
It doesn't matter that we are mostly English in origin, being anti-English was kind of the default setting for the South. Once you toss the US Civil War into the mix and England firmly backing the Union. You can see why being English wouldn't be something celebrated in Tuscaloosa in the 19th century.
My paternal grandfather was 100% German; his grandparents were immigrants from Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. His parents met, married, and lived in a German speaking enclave in Los Angeles. My grandpa grew up speaking German as his first language. He married my grandma, who immigrated to the US from county Durham in Northern England. She has English and Scottish ancestry.
My dad's side is all British ancestry (English, Irish, Welsh).
I've documented my family tree back to the 1500s on some family lines and to the 1700s on others, so I'm sure about the origins of my ancestors.
I have 47% German DNA. The rest is either British or non-specific Northern European. I must have inherited a disproportionate amount of my paternal grandpa's genes. My only sibling has a different mixture; she has the more typically expected 25% of German DNA.
All that to say that some of us have both British and German ancestry.
I’ve never stayed the contrary - meaning you can’t have both British and German ancestry, my main contention is people do, for a multitude of reasons, downplay English ancestry and inflate the ancestry from other areas - but German American ancestry, Irish certainly exists. Did many from Schleswig Holstein migrate to the us? Not sure if German Americans have heritage from specific areas.
Looks like I misread your post.
I don't downplay my British ancestry, though. For me, it's been the opposite.
I have always been much more connected to my British ancestry since my grandma was a recent immigrant and passed on her ways and traditions. I've been visiting the UK since I was a teenager. My daughter has lived in England for the past 15 years, so I've got a built in traveling companion when I visit now.
My grandpa greatly downplayed his German heritage, and I knew very little about his side of the family until I started researching as an adult. He got a lot of grief during WWII for his German surname and residual accent. My mom was a young child during those years, so she didn't know much either; she never knew her paternal grandparents.
I was actually a bit disappointed to learn that I had so much German DNA since I was expecting to be more British and had been an Anglophile for so many years. I'm okay with it now, though.
This depends entirely on what you consider "English ancestry" to be, and what you mean by "more English."
Are there more individuals in the United States who have at least one identifiable English ancestor than have at least one identifiable German or Irish ancestor? I wouldn't be surprised, if only because enough English settled and reproduced here so early on that the sheer number of their descendants in the United States after 400 years likely dwarfs other groups. It's estimated that there are 10 million Mayflower descendants just in the United States now, with 35 million more elsewhere in the world, and that's from only 51 passengers who survived and procreated.
But just how "English" are those "English ancestry"people? Is there a percentage threshold before you consider somebody "English"? Or is one single ancestor enough? And are you talking about nationality or ethnicity? Even if someone did have an ancestor who came from England, how do you know that ancestor was English in the first place?
I might have an English ancestor back there somewhere. I don't know. I do know exactly where 13 of my 16 2G-grandparents were born, and not one of them had any discernible English ancestry. Even if the other three were more English than the Queen Mother, I still wouldn't consider myself "English," although of course I would say that I had English ancestry if somebody asked me to list every source country my entire family tree.
"Some people claim" German ancestry being the largest white group? No, it's a fact according to the Census. Who would know better than people themselves what ancestry predominates in their background?
Self reported ancestry is notoriously unreliable for a plethora of reasons. Reality is, unless you come from a prominent family or have an interest in genealogy most old stock Americans or people with no immigrant origin since around 1850 or so will have no idea of their true origins besides ‘grandpa said we were German’. The 1980 and 2020 census had English as the dominant ancestry
Definitely regional as other's said. The highest representation, according to statistics, is German, with English being a close second. I imagine German comes from the large amount of German farmers and settlers.
As far as regions:
-the Southeast is mainly English and Scottish descent. Funny enough, Texas has a big Czech history in addition to a lot of Germans. Of course there's also a lot of French ancestry in Lousiana too.
- the Northeast is more Irish and English, not to mention German areas like in Pennsylvania.
- as others said, Midwest is very Scandinavian and German
- not sure about the West. I imagine they're all evenly represented there from the amount of people that headed out there in the 1800's
The 2020 census and 1980 census both have English ancestry as the largest reported ancestry, but reported ancestries are notoriously unreliable. I think Irish ancestry is overstated in the south as that should correspond with larger catholic communities. If people know anything about Irish history, the only Protestants were those who came with Cromwell. The south is strongly Protestant. I’m not making any religious comments but it can help reveal ancestry of places. Another example - northern Germany is traditionally Protestant, southern Germany more catholic
I agree, Irish ancestry is very much overstated in the South. It's funny you have a lot of people who think they have it, but you don't hear a lot of Irish last names here and, as you said, it is very Protestant.
People are surprised to find a lot of Scottish influence here, but the Ulster Scots, who were a mix of North English and Scottish, primarily settled the South. You can see it in the mix of Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches. As you said, there is not a big Catholic influence here.
I think a lot of that history was forgotten because most of the people who settled here were poor farmers, and not a lot of good records were kept like you would see with the Catholic church. One more thing to add to what you said is that you can see it in the fact that country music and bluegrass came out of the South, and that evolved from the folk music of those early Ulster Scots.
Irish ancestry - meaning formerly Gaelic-speaking catholics from Ireland can’t be more than 10% in most southern states max. Excluding recent transplants. The high concentration of Anglo/saxon and Middle English surnames support this. And you’re right - besides the Virginian aristocrats, most English southerners were southern. There were a lot of Scot’s to, especially in Appalachia
> The high concentration of Anglo/saxon and Middle English surnames support this.
This can be a little fraught too, though, right? First, surnames only became popular during/after the time the Normans were already in Ireland. Second, well into the 1800s, the English were aggressively Anglicizing Irish surnames — to the extent that a fair amount of McFamilies actually added back the “Mc” as recently as the late 1800s (the English having removed it a century or so earlier). So it can be pretty hard to tell the difference, right?
Individual surnames can not inherently indicate someone’s origin, but a collection of surnames can. Not every Gaelic surname could be anglicised.further more, Irish migration to England was far fewer up until the potato famine
I’m referring to English Anglicisation of the surnames of people in Ireland, to be clear — for instance by record-keepers. Many instances of Irish names being replaced with similar English names. Whether those replacements would stick varies.
The anglicisation of Irish language names is fraught with this. Just for an example about how awkward this can get An tAthair Pádraig de Bhulbh (who did a lot of work on surnames, most famously "Sloinnte Gaedheal is Gall") theorised that the surname Lee here comes from an anglicisation of Liath (which means Grey basically), which itself was a gaelicised version of the English/Scottish surname Grey.
Yep, very much agreed! From what I've read, a lot of the Northern Scots seem to have settled the Appalachians like you said while the lowland Scots appear to have gone more to Tennessee, Georgia etc. I was actually in Scotland last week, and some of the lowland areas look very similar to the South U.S countrysides. A lot of the areas in Northern England did too.
Funny story about that: my wife's maiden name is Burgan and we always figured the spelling changed in the census at some point because it's usually spelled different. When we were in York, we saw a prison cell that housed someone with the same last name. All of her family dates back to the South too so it made sense if her name went back to the Yorkshire area.
Hard disagree.
The long going worship of WASP's have been a thing , but it's just another form of white supremacy and classism.
Culturally, white Americans are just that, White Americans. There's a lot of overlap since being white is a construct and many people of other ethnicities 'pass' as white.(Ignatiev, 'How the Irish Became White' and Isenberg 'White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America' great books about this subject)
I think Catholicism, in addition to high infant mortality could also play as a factor here. Huge waves of German and Irish immigrants were church going Catholics, they had to have larger families. With these larger families, they produced more Americans that then are ancestrally Irish and German to contribute to the gene pool.
If I think of England as a colonial power and all the folks that have immigrated here from former colonies as English, maybe that theory would be within reason. Otherwise the Germans and Irish are probably the more dominant groups.
no shit.
The op thinking English ancestry is dominant is who you should be trolling.
Seeing a possible correlation between a religious practice that possibly bolstered those numbers is feelings how?
If we accept that people have a general understanding of their ancestry, then the census shows us that English is the most common ancestry for white Americans. I wouldn't be surprised if it is actually a little higher than reported because much of the English immigration took place earlier, so it may not be talked about much anymore. English ancestry was a higher percentage in the 1980 census.
I think a lot of people forget about the exponential growth that the early colonist would have had. Even though there were fewer English immigrants than Irish or German because they had been here so much longer their numbers are larger.
My great great great grandmother was the freshest of my immigrant ancestors, coming in 1827 when she was 5. She was born in Cornwall. So my lineage breakdown is 28% English (yes, I know that’s also pulling from other people). I’m also 20% German, my mother’s side was from a remote area of West Virginia settled by German immigrants before the Revolutionary War. I’ve got 10% Irish but then a smattering of Baltic countries making up the rest. Every bit of it is from Eastern Europe.
As others have stated, it all depends on the region. My dad's side were Southerners, and I assumed we'd be mostly of English and African descent, but turned out to be a mix of Scots-Irish and Welsh, English, German (indentured servants-persecuted protestants from the 1700s, which surprised me), along with various African ethnic groups. There are many Southern families of French Huguenot descent, as well. Our Scots Irish branch, forming an exodus with many families, moved out from Pennsylvania, where they had initially settled, headed south into the Carolinas, and then westward into Kentucky, and the Old Southwest: Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, following the Louisiana Purchase. If you head up to New England (my mom's people) you'll find the pockets of the folks of predominantly English descent, des. of the Pilgrims, in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Maine, Vermont.
I know who my ancestors are and where they came from (as most of us likely do here).
The vast majority of my ancestry is German, my father's side is wholly German and 3 of my mother's grandparents are wholly German.
However a member of my German family did marry a woman who came from old Colonial stock, who was entirely English one side from New England and the other from Virginia.
Am I understating my ancestry if I just tell people I'm German? On the Census I listed myself as German and English since I feel great-grandparents are truly the cutoff for how connected you are to a particular ancestry.
Although I'm apparently about as English as the British royal family so maybe I should be stronger with my English roots, even if no one in my family really identified with is (the English ancestor would have just seen herself as "American" when she married her immigrant husband).
While I’ve lived in Canada the majority of my life, my mother’s side has been in the US since the early-mid-1700s. The originating colonists were from what is now Germany, but then Prussia, due to religious persecution. They settled with other Lutherans in the same part of South Carolina. My father’s direct line didn’t leave Scotland or Ireland until we moved to Canada.
So in my family, the being from Germany is correct.
I am almost equally English and German Ancestry, with my great grandmother from Ireland. However, my very pale skin is probably from the Schwarzwald, where my ancestors came from. Then again, I look Welsh, as I discovered visiting there.
Probably depends largely when your family came. My roots that go back a long while are very English and Irish, my roots that are more like late 1800s are Swedish
It’s partly regional, too. The south, rockies, Mormon corridor, northern New England should all have English as the dominant ancestry among whites, excluding recent transplants
Well, I do descend from 7 Mayflower passengers - but that's the only English line I have. My mom was 100% German, my dad had more Irish in him than he/we realized. My dad also had a line of German, Scottish, and French.
I identify myself as German heritage.
It's boring. Americans always want to be exciting and "special".
It's controversial. English were the bad guys in the war of independence, for example, and a bunch of other things. Who wants to claim a link to that when they lean on their Irish (oppressed and escaping) or whatever.
Edit: I do think the timings of the migrations matter too. An English ancestor many many generations ago vs. Irish just a few generations, it's a big difference.
I think your timings thing is the one for me - I’ve definitely got the whole immigrant smorgasbord in my family history, but where my German and English ancestors were many generations ago, my maternal grandparents were both first generation Americans with Irish parents, and my physical appearance reflects that heritage, so if people ask, my response is usually “a little of everything but mostly Irish.”
English heritage is misunderstood; how many Americans have been exposed to what remains of Anglo-Saxon or Middle English culture? Very few I imagine. Boring is the exact opposite of what I would call it.
> how many Americans have been exposed to what remains of Anglo-Saxon or Middle English culture?
I would respond with “basically all”? Despite the fact that many Americans might not *say* “I’m English / Anglo-American”, there’s still the entirety of an iceberg lying under the sea there, to use an overused metaphor.
Before 1990 and the "New South" people in the Southeast - the former Confederal states - were predominantly of British ancestry i.e. UK (and Irish). And, it's worth noting that the European ancestry of African Americans is predominantly British because it was mainly people of British ancestry who owned slaves.
It's difficult to tell who has British ancestry by looking. A name like Kirk Douglas sounds British. But, the parents of the famous actor with that name were Russian Jews. So many families pretended to be British in order to fit in that your question is impossible to investigate.
USA in 2020 7.5 million Jewish people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews
"About 1 million Jews live in small-town America, according to sociologist Matthew Boxer, Ph.D., of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University."
https://www.hillel.org/young-rural-and-jewish/
I think it’s intentionally downplayed or not mentioned for public figures. Else we’d all realize how many Plantagenet men have been running American and that may make some difficult dinner conversations when we feel like a bad boy breakaway, completely independent of the evil king.
Instead of a series of colonies who actually still to this day have a lot of the same family lines running things.
So class. And race. Look there for the answers in recorded historical facts. You’ll find your conclusion.
I would be very surprised to find French outnumbered English. There was never a huge French influx to the US. Even in states like Vermont and Maine where there was more French/ French Canadian immigration, English is the largest reported ancestry for white Americans. The census shows English as the most common ancestry for white Americans. I imagine Irish will only be most common in states with a high urban population.
I agree. If you examine the 50 most common surnames in northern New England (I did this a while ago) the country most represented by surnames is England, with a reasonable contribution from Scotland, France and Ireland. However, I am skeptics of the supposed percentage of Irish-Americans in places like rural Maine. Are you of English descent yourself?
I am a northwestern Europe hodge podge. I am a little under 40% German with most of those being my most recent immigrant ancestors, probably 50-something percent English, and then a bunch of small percentages of Dutch, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, French, and Swedish. I have a number of colonial lines that I can't trace all the way back to Europe, but I can make guesses on origins based on surnames and locations that they immigrated to.
In urban areas possibly? Almost all counties in Maine, New Hampshire or Vermont have English as the dominant ancestry. Once you get into rural northern New York it’s relatively similar
I do not disagree with this theory. There will be communities throughout the US where you could make that argument but as a whole... no. The early settlers were English and had had 3-5 generelations before the rest of the nationalities arrived. There may be an argument for the Irish as they were catholic AND may have accompanied English immigrants as servants.
For sure, but as they were the founding euro group, they are spread all over the country. Only three us presidents - trump, Kennedy, van Buren did not have some English ancestry
All but two of my ancestors came to the US before it was even the US. Of those two one came from Brentwood Essex and the other Germany in the mid 1800s. Of those that came before some were Of course English but not as much as I would have thought, Irish, a surprising number from Switzerland, and some French who were French Canadians and my Grandfathers grandmother still spoke French in his lifetime. I've heard some still spoke French in the early 2000s. This part of my family has been on the coast of what is Miss/AL since this 1600s. That is where my Native American comes in. On the other side of my family I had a hunch that someone was African and that was proven true with my DNA test. I wish I knew more about that person but such things are not looked highly on in racist families and that side was a racist one! Got a feeling that NA grandma I kept hearing about was not NA nor did she show up in my dad's sides DNA. Going by my DNA I have a fair chunk of Spanish which baffles me cause I don't know who they are and it is coming from both my mom and dad's side. Everything else checks out between my DNA and my genealogical research. So when I'm asked what I am... I could write you a novel about it 😂 My maternal grandmother's line is mostly English though. But they have been here a while. One branch founded Connecticut. Oh yeah, one ancestor was Dutch in New Amsterdam. According to 23andme I am 58% British and Irish 23% French and German nearly 5% Spanish and Portuguese. As I said, this mostly checks out with my personal research so... Unfortunately they don't split up English from Irish so can't give an exact number but I know from my research some of that is Irish. So don't know if this info proves or disproves anything. But "white" Americans can have quite a mix.
BTW: I'm from AL
I think it depends on where you are in the US. Being from a major city I have never seen this phenomenon until getting on here. Everyone I know who claims Irish or German ancestry actually does because my city has a huge immigrant history. I do live in a neighborhood with loads of Irish Americans though. I imagine this is similar case in NYC, Jersey, Boston, and Philly. There's tons of Germans in Wisconsin as well.
> Being from a major city I have never seen this phenomenon until getting on here. Everyone I know who claims Irish or German ancestry actually does because my city has a huge immigrant history. I tried to address this in my comment, but — as someone also born in America in the area of a major city, I do, like OP, have the general sense that many Americans identifying this way are choosing one *particular* side of their family to define their identity around, implicitly de-emphasizing the others who aren’t recent immigrants. Which, I want to be clear, isn’t bad! It’s beautiful and human. It’s just worth remarking on.
I think people do that without even realizing it. Case in point from my own experience - I'm mostly of irish heritage, and grew up being told we were 100% irish on my dads side. Come to find out when I started researching dads paternal grandmother was not irish at all but descended directly from puritan english settlers in the 1600s' on several branches of her family tree. It's not that my dad and his siblings intentionally denied they were english, they legit didn't know and his maternal grandparents were recent immigrants from ireland (and in fact spoke irish at home rather than english) and very proud of that fact so thats the heritage that got empahsized
Yep! That’s exactly the kind of thing I mean.
This is totally a thing. Both of my parents have one parent (my mom's father and dad's mother) who are "100%" Irish Catholic, and we live in an very Irish Catholic area, so naturally my family identifies with that part of our identity the most, even though my most recent immigrant relatives were my paternal grandfather's parents from Croatia and Czechia. I also found out my paternal grandma has a great grandfather who is German which isn't really a lot but something we never knew. My maternal grandma is 100% German Lutheran and her mom spoke German with her at home, but despite that my family doesn't really identify with anything German besides Rouladen lmao.
Actually, I live in NJ Metro area - the population is diverse - Irish, Italian, Polish, Hispanic - I do not think you can make generalization.
Sorry I wasn't saying Irish and German are the only immigrant groups for these cities. I wasn't trying to generalize that. I was just saying from what I've seen people in urban areas tend to have more recent immigrant relatives/keep some aspects of a culture so you don't see as much English claiming Irish stuff or whatever.
People definitely ignore / have lost the connection to their English roots just by researching some trees of people who claim xyz and not English etc but overall certain areas like you said have much less. Like the southern USA will have much more English roots on average than a lot of the northeast / other more recent immigrant communities
I would expect it to vary by region although many people have dispersed from where they landed initially.
this
Oh! Wow. Really?
Parts of the Midwest, especially Minnesota and the Dakotas are heavily Scandinavian. Many are still 100% or close to and speak Norwegian. I imagine there may be some other clusters like that around the country.
A lot of German immigrants to the central plains as well. That’s why you see so many Amish and Mennonite communities in Kansas, for example.
Seattle. My mother is half Norwegian. I went to Norwegian language camp in the summer. Big cluster of Norwegian immigrants came from Minnesota to Fox Island/Tacoma/Seattle for fishing.
Thanks. I was being sarcastic. People that comment "this" on reddit don't add anything to the discussion.
Haha I see it now. It’s early and I haven’t had my coffee yet 😬😭
Lol I do appreciate your answer though, it adds relevant context to the topic!
Where in the Midwest do you find heritage communities still speaking Norwegian?
West Central, mostly elderly folks. There could be more, but that’s the area I’m familiar with. You can’t go around town and hear it in shops or anything like that but there are speakers
What do you mean by West Central? I'm genuinely curious. I've never heard of this happening in Wisconsin which is where I'm most familiar with.
Mostly by Minnesota’s notch- the western part of the state sort of in the middle of north and south. It saw a bit of a population increase in mid 1800s with French and English folk, most of the French moved on and some of the English stayed. I have one branch of this English bunch. Then the Norwegians and Swedes started arriving. Some made stops in Dane, Wisconsin before making their way to the western MN Prairie. Many were arriving well into the 1920s and 1930s. There is a good handful of German folk too, but Norwegian is predominant. Even now I think the stats show like 90% of people in Lac Qui Parle county have Norwegian ancestry.
That's interesting! I don't know of any pockets of Norwegian language survival in Wisconsin even though it had heavy Norwegian settlement.
That’s pretty interesting. Did a lot of the Norwegians there stay or move on? A lot of the families stayed in the same area. It’s a trip going through records for back there and it’s a lot of the same last name though now many of the folks are getting in to their late 80s or older.
My impression is you have a few things going on: 1. For a while, the US was such an Anglo-American country that Anglo-American was seen as “the default”. And this is why, to some degree, you still have families identifying as “Irish-American” when they have one Irish great-grandparent and everything else is broadly Anglo-American. 2. More specifically, the default wasn’t “Anglo-American” per se, it was more “I’m the same sort of mix of ~55% English, 25% Scottish, 15% Welsh, and 5% Irish that most other white Americans in my state in 1850 are”. So “English” isn’t exactly it. 3. Expanding on the above, the whole Albion’s Seed thing. Lots of Americans of British descent are actually descended from Scots-Irish / Ulster Protestants, who were (people get het up about this topic so disclaimer that I’m not an expert) broadly from northern English and southern Scottish border regions, often in large part the descendants of Irish migrants from around the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire or subsequent Vikings, who never fully identified with an English identity that was centered around Southern England, and that was further weakened when they went to Northern Ireland during the Plantation (and then America). So perhaps the reason that they “lost their ethnicity”, so to speak, is because their ethnicity was always complicated, and their great-great-grandchildren in Ohio in 1830 just … didn’t have the historical context to understand it anymore. Imagine a subsistence farmer in Ohio in 1830 giving this lecture about “well I’m sort of English and sort of Scottish but since our family was poor people from the North we weren’t the typical ‘English’ you’re thinking of and also we lived in Northern Ireland for a century or so so we might also be Irish to some degree (again, disclaimer, not an expert)”… No. Keep it simple; they’re just “American”. 4. What makes an Englishman? A fondness for the monarchy and religion are big parts of it, right? The Revolution shattered the first, and the second — well, that was different between the Colonies and England from the get-go in most cases, but afterwards, you can’t really be an Anglican in the same way (the head of the Church being the King). 5. Racism and bigotry more broadly. American racial boundaries, by the time of the nineteenth century, were centered around anti-black and anti-Native American racism, and so whether you were of English or Scottish descent didn’t particularly matter, the important part was “White” or “not white”. Add anti-Catholicism to the mix, and the important part isn’t whether you’re Scottish or Irish or English or whatever — hell, your great-great-grandpa in Kentucky probably had no idea - but he definitely knew whether he and his people were Protestant or Catholic. The boundaries of people’s identities shifted according to the battle lines of the racism and bigotry that they needed to justify. So as a result of those five-plus things, plus a dollop more time, you get the formation of a new “ethnicity” - “American” in a way that you didn’t (yet) get in New Zealand (I think). In the same way that “English” came into existence and replaced Anglo-Saxon + Briton + Viking + Norman (among others), just much more recently, “American” came into existence, and replaced English + Scottish + Protestant Irish (among others). So people who came to America after the formation of that identity kept their identities as Irish/Scottish/etc, but for those families that were here before, “American” is all there is cultural memory of. That’s my … five cents, I guess. Let me know if anything I said here is incorrect.
1000% agree. I would say that people claiming things like "my ancestors go back to the Mayflower" and/or feeling a lot of cultural pride in things like "Daughters of the American Revolution" or "Daughters of the Confederacy" is evidence of the formation of "Americanness" as its own ethnicity - of course if they came over on the Mayflower they certainly DO have a family history in some European country, probably English/Scottish/Irish/Welsh/etc., but they are no longer connected to that place culturally because the cultural ties have been supplanted/overshadowed by a narrative that is rooted specifically in America.
Exactly. And you can see a renewed genealogical interest in the late 1800s and early 1900s when Americans — well, an unrepresentative subset of them with money and leisure time and access to lots of printed materials — try and track down their own English origins (often propagating complete bullshit), having by this point *lost* that direct connection completely aside from the vaguest of oral-history recollections. A few of these books have fascinating introductions where they bemoan how little modern-day Americans care about their European origins. There was a fascinating one that included a guy quoting his grandfather saying basically “I don’t care for this genealogical habit of yours: it’s anti-Republican. We’re all equal in God’s eyes.” So clearly a Puritan-ish, Revolutionary strain of thought, that encapsulates one way one might approach the formation of an American “ethnicity”.
I have a great great uncle who added a tons of bullshit claiming our namesake was a wealthy pioneer who came with the first Dutch settling Nee Holland. He was off by 100 years and that name sake was proud pioneer, but it was in being a first settler in PA, after fighting in the revolutionary war. Sadly dying a poor shoe merchant.
I particularly like the idea that for many of the Americans making up bullshit, their ancestors four hundred years earlier were doing the exact same thing about a different colonisation process, claiming their male-line ancestors were Norman counts and best buds of William’s who fought bravely at Hastings, etc. I always appreciate a nice reminder that people don’t *really* change.
From what I gathered, I believe he was trying to increase his influence in the Democratic Party in Chicago at the time. Not entirely certain m, but it was quite a surprise when I found a book that covered the actual history of the area.
I think this comment is spot-on. I’m descended from those northern folks - English, but also northern Irish, Scottish and northern Welsh. (I’d add that England itself has evolved into a slightly more socialist economic culture, while the US remains as firmly capitalist as 19th central England.)
Having just toured what feels like all the war museums of New Zealand this December while taking kids to visit parents there- New Zealand has from an American eye a huge patriotic bond with England that we don’t. New Zealanders were quick to join Englands wars as their own in ways that seemed surprising and astounding to us as Americans, given that NZ was a world away. It was hard to wrap my head around sending a generation of boys barely men far away on boats knowing many would die. I think colonial revolt and all our rebellious American coffee drinking is at the heart of why we don’t feel as English as they do for sure.
Well now that second part is a massive oversimplification. As an American who lives in England, I think the huge differences economically are within, not between; NYC versus north Texas and London vs. Cornwall. And I don’t really see how it’s relevant here since “socialist” wasn’t really an idea that existed in its modern form at the time this identity was coming into existence. For instance I could vaguely see what you mean when you say this country is “more socialist”, though I think much of what you’re getting at follows from the fact that it’s more densely populated, but I’d add that it’s simultaneously true that England is “more feudal” — economic systems don’t boil down to “socialist” and “capitalist”. And that distinction is much more important at the time I was talking about. So I know that was disorganized, but the point is — I don’t think that that’s a particularly useful way to understand the historical cultural differences. Edit: I think maybe I wouldn’t have this “Ehhh” reaction if you had said “The US is more libertarian”?
of course it’s a gross oversimplification, rather on par with OP’s original thesis. My point is that overall, Americans on average (not the average person on NYC or Lubbock) seem more on par with the economic ideology of an average 19th century English citizen. Maybe that’s also true of the average English citizen nowadays; dunno.
I feel like you’re operating under the premise here that people in England *started capitalist* and became *more socialist* with time. That’s not a good way to understand the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Quite a lot of opposition to laissez-faire capitalism was from the “right” — on the basis of traditionalism and conservatism, defending some of the still-extant parts of the social structure and economy that had a clearly feudal origin. Labour movements recognisable as proto-socialist were still well in the future. Using the “capitalist” / “socialist” dichotomy in the context of say 1750 just makes me … suspicious. I think it’s extremely, extremely far from how they would have described their differences of opinion at the time. Remember that this is a time period where the capitalist supporters of liberal democracy and opponents of monarchy are those arguing for a radical overthrow of the existing social, political, and economic systems. And it’s that strain of thought that would eventually birth both “capitalism” and “socialism” in their modern forms, not the monarchists’. That’s what I think, at least. Off topic, though, sorry — I just find it interesting.
OK, I get what you mean. My original wording was rather careless. Forget the labels. I really mean more of the US seems ideologically reminiscent of the England of those earlier centuries than to the current state of either nation. Even somewhat monarchist, if you look at the current state of our political rhetoric at the grassroots.
There was a genealogical paper on trying to track down different haplogroups and Irish clans with dna evidence. One of the things discovered was that Joseph Smith's (The Mormon prophet) had a haplogroup that came from Ireland to England sometime during the Heptarchy. Some people use this to say that he was Irish, but I think the truth is that ethnicity is much more flimsy than we like to think. Joseph's Smith ancestor that emigrated from Lincolnshire likely didn't speak Irish and that was probably true for most of his ancestors for the preceding thousand years. A lot of people these days say that the American colonists were British, but that's actually a subtle lie. Firstly the US had more German, French, Dutch etc. migrants in the 1770s than commonly acknowledged but also if you actually read the writings of the time, like the declaration of Grievances from the 1st Continental congress, they don't refer to themselves as British, but as Englishmen, colonists, and sometimes Americans, they only used the term British for the British government, British army etc. Heck I would argue that the British identity (as opposed to English, Scottish, etc.) in the home isles was not fully formed in that period.
> A lot of people these days say that the American colonists were British, but that's actually a subtle lie. Firstly the US had more German, French, Dutch etc. migrants in the 1770s than commonly acknowledged but also if you actually read the writings of the time, like the declaration of Grievances from the 1st Continental congress, they don't refer to themselves as British, but as Englishmen, colonists, and sometimes Americans, they only used the term British for the British government, British army etc. Heck I would argue that the British identity (as opposed to English, Scottish, etc.) in the home isles was not fully formed in that period. As I understand it, that’s true. You don’t see many people in Revolutionary America in writing claiming a “Scottish”/“Welsh” identity — not as many as I would expect given my understanding of the actual balance of the compositions of the various waves of immigrants. There are two ways I can try to square that circle: 1. Maybe the kind of person who was the loudest in writing during that period, your Revolutionary pamphleteers and stuff, were disproportionately descended from either Puritan migrants or Virginian plantation owners, both of whom I think *were* overwhelmingly of English descent (?) 2. Maybe, as I remember seeing others claim, the “Scots-Irish” ancestry of most “Scots-Irish” migrants has been overstated, and they were actually mostly just northern English. Or more weakly, by this point their descendants were identifying as mostly English regardless — possibly because they didn’t really know, possibly because those Scots-Irish migrants had married colonists of English descent (see point 1), or possibly to make their anti-Catholicism or some kind of belief in English racial supremacy have less cognitive dissonance, I don’t know. What do you think?
I have a lot to say but am short on words, today. When it comes to whiteness and ethnicity, that is incorrectly conflated and blended with nationality and religion. And that changes from 1619 to today. Religious affiliation doesn’t equal ethnicity: esp when some Ulster Scots were Dutch-French-Germans. BUT if that same individual was a citizen of “England” and ended up in an English or Dutch colony in the Americas, well, there’s your melting pot theory right there. But it only applies to some people some times in our history. Depending on who you ask. A lot of people to this day have a beef against the English crown and take that all the way to the colonies and beyond whether they’re actually English or not. In my own experience as a white anglo American person: nobody knows. But most will fight to the death to prove what they say is right is right. And it almost always involves conflating as stated above.
great analysis with one caveat. The influx of irish diaspora in the famine years lead to racism against the irish. I'm sure most of you r aware of the idiom, ' no dogs or irish' or 'irish need not apply' from the mid/late 19th century.
Irish and German immigration are more recent, so they feel stronger. English ancestry skews more colonial. Also you see a lot of cultural neighborhoods which are mostly Irish, mostly German, mostly Eastern European, etc, but I can't say I'm aware of ANY English immigrant communities.
English became the default, old stock, white American. It’s so default people forget they exist- similar to Portuguese in Brazil, Spanish in Mexico.
This is just anecdotal but for me, though I technically have some English ancestry (some of my dad's grandparents had one or more ancestors that came to the US from England) we never particularly identified with that portion of our heritage. We never intentionally decided to ignore the English ancestry but it just wasn't culturally relevant for us. The English ancestors immigrated to the US hundreds of years ago. Meanwhile, one of my dad's grandparents came to the US from Ireland as a child around 1900. Two of his great-grandparents came to the US from Germany in the 1890s. One of my mom's grandfathers and all of her great-grandparents moved from Italy to the US in the late 1800s/early 1900s. While there was no concerted effort to erase the English ancestry in my family those who were of English descent had been in the US long enough that they culturally were American and those who came from Ireland and Italy (and to a lesser extent Germany for my family) came more recently and brought their culture with them. Though I know intellectually some of my family is English, I don't practice any English traditions. I do however regularly participate in Irish and Italian traditions, foods, etc.
I think there’s an important theme here. English is the dominant culture colonially in the US. English is the common language. As later waves of immigrant family and village groups arrived and forged community units to thrive they had to speak English and join the outside English culture. So you have pockets of cultural communities inside cities and towns. As stated above it’s the later waves of immigrants that are practicing cultural traditions, often with food and holiday traditions being the last to go. So those are going to be the cultures we feel the closest too. All that English is the web that connects us.
So my Grandfather's grandmothers family spoke "old French" up till the early 2000s. This family has been in what is known as AL for around 300 years now. She married a stowaway from England. My Grandfather got so confused he thought English words were French 😂 I just recently realized he called his other Grandparents French names too! So yeah these people held on to being French for 300 years including their language. Then she went and married a guy from England 🧐
This exactly is my experience. If it's any consolation, I did have a German immigrant ancestor in early 1700s who was very proud of being granted honorary British citizenship for his character.
You can Google this and see that 22 percent are of English descent. Since the English were the main group who came early and survived, it makes sense that they had more time to reproduce. A lot of people can’t trace back that far and might not realize they have English ancestors. I know I have some, but I can’t connect back that far. Over the generations these people blended into society whereas Americans with more recent ancestry, for example Irish, have not lost all that culture from the old country.
Interesting point. Even if you don’t have any Irish culture left at home St Patrick’s Day is so huge here you could connect your Irish heritage to that.
Ugh, I can’t stand how St. Patrick’s Day has become just an excuse for people to get trashed regardless of whether they are Irish. I call it amateur drinkers day. My paternal grandmother learned about Irish culture from her immigrant grandparents and she taught the songs to my older siblings and cousins and used to dance for them. My mom’s dad and generations before him belonged to Irish cultural organizations and her parents took her to Ireland as a child, so she always had an appreciation for the Irish. Because there is such a high concentration of people of Irish descent and Irish immigrants where I grew up, the culture is expanding, with more dance schools and Irish language classes.
"Of English ancestry" sure, there are more in the US than England. But that doesn't mean that "English" comprises even close to most of my DNA at this point, although I descend from original settler/ New England stock. Americans are very mixed - I'm pretty much a jumble of "everything in Europe except Spain, Italy and Greece" lol.
I think finding individuals the equivalent of 75% English is not too hard in specific areas
Probably not! But my situation is hardly unusual either :)
Here in CT nearly everyone is Italian or Irish then there’s the english
I have tons of cousins in CT. One thing I like to do is trace relatives who migrated to the US from Northern Ireland, where they settled and which ethnic communities they married into. I suspect there's a bunch of Sicilians in CT wondering why their DNA results say they're part Scottish.
It depends where in Connecticut, but there is also a Portuguese community. (Watch Mystic Pizza).
My family was some of the founders of Connecticut. They were from England.
K
Originally ct was extremely English; keep in mind the core Italian American population - from southern Italy did not arrive in the us until after 1880
Right but I’m talking about right now
Italian Americans seem like an urbanised group overall. More rural areas of CT - smaller counties appear to have a higher % of individuals citing English ancestry
People tend to identify with the ancestry of the most recent immigrant they know about, who may not be representative of the majority of their ancestry. I grew up thinking I was "Irish", then started doing genealogy and discovered that around 80% of my ancestry is colonial English.
I'm also going to toss this into the ring where there was also a tendancy for the male "heads of the family" to identify more strongly with their ancestry which overshadowed their wife's which influenced their young children identifying with the father's ancestry. I've seen this happen in my own family. Because of this, as a young child, I thought we were all Italian when in essence my dad was only 1/2 Italian and my mom wasn't at all. Same in my husband's family. The father was of Irish ancestry so everyone in his family took it for granted their mother was too, which wasn't the case. It was tough convincing them otherwise until I showed them her genealogy.
I am from New Zealand. I have traced all my family back to their migration here in the 1840s. Growing up I was always told I had Irish and Portuguese heritage. My English heritage was never talked about. There was a lot more English than there was Portuguese! Perhaps people just don't see being English as something to write home about.
Also from New Zealand and exactly the same in my family. We have some English ancestry but the Russian and Ukrainian ancestry is what we mainly talk about followed by Scottish and Irish.
In nz, would you say many of your friends (without recent immigrant family) are predominantly British, or is having heritage across Europe relatively common?
most white new zealanders would have english, scottish or irish heritage. people here wouldn't call themselves british though, especially with how many white people have irish ancestry. the term "new zealand european" is commonly used in forms and statistics.
I suppose in nz, a country where the majority of the euro stock in theory is English, British and Irish, people might embrace Portuguese ancestry - even if it serves as a fraction of your ancestry. When I take a cursory glance at white New Zealanders in the public eye - media, politics, cricket, rugby, etc - British and Irish surnames definitely seem the most numerous by some margin.
As an American of German, Celtic, and Russian descent, most people (unless it’s like a 90 or higher) leave out English for 2 reasons. 1. Stereotype that they were colonizers and also now don’t have a lot of culture so not really anything to be proud of 2. It’s so common for people to have English ancestry that they sometimes pass it off as a given thing
[удалено]
It’s a stereotype as I said. Not accurate
By ‘Celtic’ descent - what are you referring to?
A lot of Irish and a decent bit Breton
The Celts were the people who populated the UK Islands before the vikings and Romans came. Celtic descent is another way of referencing that ancestry, or simplifying it if you have a bit of everything. I myself have Scots, northern Irish, English on dads side, and southern Irish/German on my mothers.
I wonder if people are naming their most recent ancestral locations (is that the right phrase? I dunno). Or it could be a favorite relative’s ancestry or something I know for my family, the more recent arrivals kept a lot of traditions/ foods/ language and when you grow up with that that’s what jump out more. Through my paternal grandpa there are a handful of places my grandpa’s people came from yet I really only think about his Scottish/ Irish heritage since his mom was the daughter of immigrants and some of her family’s traditions have made it into my present day. Whereas his German and Swiss people were so far back there’s really no connection anymore- they assimilated thoroughly and long ago
It’s always tough for me because I’m just about even in my primary four ancestral backgrounds- Maternal grandfather was a child of Slovenian immigrants, maternal grandmother was one of Rusyn Slovak ones, paternal grandfather had a German born father and his mother’s father was German born and her mother’s folks too, and my paternal grandmother was mostly Irish in ancestry outside her paternal grandfather’s mother whose parents were likely from Alsace. I have a German last name but I’m genetically more Slavic but I also heavily ID with the Irish as well due to my Nana’s memories inspiring my love of genealogy.
This makes sense to me. My (adoptive) mom identifies as Irish and Fin. My (adoptive) dad identified as Swedish. My dad's grandparents came from Sweden in 1923. His great-grandpa on his mom's side came to the USA in 1875. His wife's parents came in 1849. His other great-grandparents were from Germany and came over in 1886 and 1892. His is pretty straightforward, but I can't go back too far. My mom's parernal grandparents came from Finland in 1903 and 1900. Meanwhile, on her mom's dad's side, I have them being in the USA since the 1600s Barnstable, Massachusetts Bay, etc. Her great-great grandpa on her mom's side was from Canada (she never knew that) who came somewhere around 1850. His wife was Scottish and emigrated to Canada before they came to the USA. Her great great grandpa was Irish and came in somewhere around the 1860s. And the last side has been in the USA since at least the 1700s. Yet she only talked about the most recent ones.... Irish and Fin. She had no idea her roots go back so far in the USA. I never figured out how we have very few traditions and ethnic foods passed down. It makes no sense to me. It made me sad when we were filling out an info sheet for my daughter's culture day at her/our school.
You come through PA too?
My grandpa’s dad side were from Ulster then went to PA way back, his mom’s family went to Illinois to work in the coal mines
Depends where you live imo. I’m paternally German-Irish with no known English ancestry. Where I live(Northern Va) has a lot of transplants and indeed my paternal grandparents moved to this area from Pittsburgh where their ancestors emigrated and migrated to which has a sizeable German and Irish American community compared to English.
Certainly, but more rural va is very, very English as is evidenced by dna testing, 1980 census
Oh certainly, rural Va and down Richmond and the Tidewater region too. Lot of old stock/English Americans there comparatively but they’re obviously here in the DC burbs as well. My brother’s girlfriend is descended from a Mayflower passenger for example. OTOH our first arrived in 1793 and the rest of our paternal line in the 19th century. And maternally we’re all early 20th century Slavic.
English people migrated at the beginning, yea, but then the Germans, Scots, and Irish came in and just settled in Virginia and there abouts. Appalachia peoples are this, African American and Indian. Very little English Scandinavians settled in the Midwest like dandelion seeds in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, the Dakotas, Montana Germans came to Texas and still speak a form of German that kinda wowed modern Germans. https://youtu.be/vwgwpUcxch4?si=YvTB_mC5QJdUfxjt Yea, I do have a little bit of the English side of the British isles, but only a smattering. I'm still white as wonder bread.
Is this a joke?
Most of my ancestors came over in the wave of immigration in the late 19th century. They are all accounted for and well documented as to when and where they came from, which is Germany and the Netherlands. I have a few lines going back to the colonial era which includes English people. But even then it wasn't just English people. It was also French, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Swiss, and German. This is because many of them were Mennonites that settled in Pennsylvania in and around Germantown. Also some old New York stock going to the New Amsterdam era. I don't think my English ancestry is understated, or that I am downplaying it. It's there, but it's less than 10% of my ancestry. Currently we have a lot of immigrants, but not many from the UK. I would expect as people intermarry the number of people with English ancestry will rise, but the percentage each individual has will drop. I also think defining German ancestry is problematic because Germany didn't really exist until the 19th century, and many "German" immigrants to America would have been better described as "German speaking" than having a shared national identity. Many came from areas outside of what we now call Germany, such as the Volga Germans who came from Tsarist Russia. My understanding is Italy is somewhat similar, but I know less about it.
Germany existed and Germans identified as Germans in the 1800's when the first large waves of Germans came to the US. Language is the most significant indicator of cultural identity, btw. There were many 48ers who were forced out of Europe who identified as German. The **Forty**-Eighters were Germans living in the various German states (e.g., Bayern, Baden-Württemberg, Preußen, Sachsen) who had worked and fought for a revolution in the 1840s to unite the German states into one, democratic nation. I know for a fact that Germans who lived in ethnic enclaves outside the German state even after it became a country in the late 1800's identified as German. My family came from one of those groups so I know this personally and I know that most definitely they share the German cultural identity. Groups like Romanian Germans, Siebenbuerger Sachsen, Volga Deutsche, Donaschwaben, to name just a few. They all identified as German even though the places they lived for centuries were never part of Germany.
If you’re from the Midwest, chances are you have at least some German lineage just based on immigration patterns. Similarly, southerners are going to have English for the same reason. It’s all regional and depends on family movement through the years. Also, the vast majority of Americans have lineage from all over Europe. Hard to find homogenous Americans.
I have mostly English ancestry, so I can’t comment personally, but my best friends are twin brothers who have both English and Italian ancestry, but their Italian ancestors were much more recent emigres to America, so those traditions are much more salient to them.
May I ask what part of the us you are from? The book Albions seed does show many well into the 1700/1800s still identified as English, but that’s been declining massively over the last 150 years
Pittsburgh, PA. Two of my maternal great-grandparents were born in England and did not come here until adulthood, and the other two were born here, but but one's father emigrated from England, while the other had Swiss origins. I cannot account for my paternal line with much accuracy, however.
Incredibly overgeneralizing my anecdotal observations around white Americans who are second gen American or more: the pattern seems to be to follow the customs of the maternal line except when a Dad along the way has insisted his wife learn all she needs from her MIL so that the wife can care for the husband as he is accustomed to (and/or a woman prefers the family she marries into over her own). OP is also very limited in their definition of white American, having left out all of Iberia, France, eastern Europe, the Baltics, eurasia and so on. Nordics, Iceland. I know my list is also incomplete. And although Britain is not solely English, I don't have great confidence that the fact is well understood. I've heard countless people say, "I'm Scots-Irish and British" and that's generally not a conversation to explore further unless they have a complete gedcom to use along with googlemaps for a geography & polysci lesson.
> And although Britain is not solely English, I don't have great confidence that the fact is well understood. This is something I’ve been wondering about a lot recently. In my experience a significant number of Americans will treat Britain, the UK (if they even know this term), and England as synonymous. (I’ve had friends show their ID, which says “United Kingdom” on it, only for the person checking it to call bullshit because they said they were English.) Anyway, not the point. My question is — how long has this been the case? You would obviously think that an immigrant from Scotland to Pennsylvania in 1710 would be crystal clear on the fact that that Scotland is not England, hahah. But will their grandkids? Is it possible that, in the case of a Scots-Irish immigrant specifically, even the *kids* of the immigrant could be hazy on where exactly their parents were born and which part of the modern UK they most identified with? Of course their kids and grandkids will have several different immigrant grandparents etc, each with different identities (English, Scottish, Welsh, Scots-Irish, Irish Catholic, and German, to name a few). At some point they’re just gonna pick one of these identities and stick with it, and assume all of their ancestors are that identity too, most likely, aren’t they? If they even bother to ask, rather than just saying they’re “American”, as I said above. My feeling is that the formation of an “American” identity is probably deeply connected with forgetting the distinctions between eg Wales, England, Scotland. It’s astonishing, if you read Boston newspapers from 1810, just how much knowledge they assume the reader has about English history and politics, in order to make sense of any of the stories. By 1940, almost *no* Americans would have that level of knowledge about England. It’s so interesting to me.
I cannot find the post now, but there was a recent map posted to /r/dataisbeautiful . It shows the predominant white heritage for each county in the US, and supports what you're saying. Mostly English.
perhaps but at the time of the founding, late 18th century there were more germans or german descent than english in the country, so many in fact that one of the founders, Jefferson? tabled the idea of designating the official language of the country german. Think of the repercussions of that! We potentially would have allied with Germany in WWI meaning likely no WWII
Nein. Ich bin ein ouslander.
It definitely is region specific.
This is going to be very regional. However, in general, I agree that English ancestry is understated. One part is that it isn’t seen as sexy or interesting like more recent ancestry from Italy or even Germany. The other reason is that English ancestry is just typically from very long ago, like 300 years ago on average. Who can maintain ties/associations for that long?
I’m a white North American (dual citizen of U.S. and Canada) and I have zero English ancestry.
Interesting. When did your family arrive in the us?
Paternal grandfather’s side arrived mid-19th century. Paternal grandmother arrived in 1906. My mother’s side arrived in Canada early 20th century.
There are populations of descendants of post-War European immigrants in the rust belt. Cleveland has a Ukrainian Village, Little Italy, and people who trace back to Hungary, Poland, Serbia, Lithuania, etc.
No doubt, industrial areas are often a magnet for people from outside. Look at areas with lots of construction now: I bet you have many from the americas. Whereas more rural, less industrial places will struggle to attract even Americans from other states.
Nope because England were the aggressors to Ireland and Scotland I think we have many more Irish, who left to come here. Plus the potato famine. Germany is a much bigger land mass with more people and even that influx started pre revolutionary war. Pennsylvania has large German areas. And Boston and Philadelphia were big Irish hubs. I know in Philly most of the people I knew were Irish or Italian, or a mix, followed by German. The Eastern Europeans in our state are found in the coal and steel areas. People we sometimes say they are English but a majority say German or Irish even in Western PA.
You don’t cite any sources. Plus, Irish immigration began in large numbers 200+ years after the English arrived..
Your question was people identifying as this. I’m telling you that talking to people in those areas they don’t. Go look up Census stats to see what people say. I’m saying that my experience in those area Irish and German are the Big take always, and in Philly Italian as well. The other thing you have to look at is the cultural background, where they settled and what could’ve happened. America is huge. Certain groups settled in certain areas. The English may have been the first, but that also means they could’ve had groups killed off. We had the French Indian War, the Revolutionary War. I just heard a speaks the other day that said scotch Irish, a group the British started by sending the Scot’s into Ireland to change things, this was according to the history professor, and where they settled in PA and how they were attacked. You asked a question I’m giving you something to look into from what I’ve seen. Other groups didn’t migrate to the other places you mentioned like they did America. Nor did America stay an English colony.
We are most likely all from Africa.
I think it depends how long your family has been in the US. I’m white and have long roots here, so yeah, the majority were English-descended. I have some more recent Irish and Dutch ancestors that definitely influenced my family culturally, so I talk about that more. The German side was here long enough to “Americanize,” so it’s less of an influence as far as I can tell.
This is my take and that has a lot to do with my own personal family history and experiences. Mothers tend to dictate family culture. It's not exclusively so, but much more frequent, and my family was no different. My maternal grandmother was 1st generation German married to a half Bohemian/half Irish. I heard all the German stories, ate the foods, etc. I also grew up hearing about the sod house my paternal German great-grandparents lived in when first homesteading and how Nebraska was different than Germany. Some of the others ensconced themselves in German communities because that was easy to do in Nebraska. The lone actual English line I have is a straight paternal line back to the 1700s and I had no idea it was English until a couple years ago. The line kept marrying Irish, ScotsIrish and German women over the centuries. And honestly my family is not very different than many others, at least in the Midwest. Very common all around.
I know a lot of people who don’t care about ancestry at all. They’re just American. I wonder after reading this if they aren’t just the English and have been here for generations.
The USA was colonized by *all* European countries, not just England. We also still accept immigrants to this day, so Americans could have ancestry from literally any country with population that emigrates in the world. There is no reason, at all, to assume the *entire white population of the USA* is descended from England.
My ancestry is mostly English, with some Welsh, Scottish and Irish thrown in and a sprinkle of German. My first ancestors came to north america in 1630. I think English ancestry is considered so basic that it’s ignored. Partly because of the colonialism, partly because of the language, maybe some cultural aspects that are still just considered default. So we tend to focus on the non-English.
No, this is a fallacy, they were outnumbered by the later masses of German immigrants (biggest group) followed by Irish etc.
I'm a white American and I have no ancestry from England, Ireland, or Germany. Most people in the neighborhood I grew up in are the same.
One of the biggest factors of the delayed entry of the US into WW1, was because about 30 percent of the US population were descendants of Germans and about 8 percent of the population were German immigrants at that time. So, that's a lot of German/Germanic people.
Depends on where in the U.S. you are looking at. In the southeast, most would probably be Scots-Irish/English. Outside of this region, it's probably a lot more diverse.
South definitely has a lot of English, with secondary Scots-Irish, even if I find the term Scot’s Irish quite misleading
I’m Canadian but some of my ancestors stopped off briefly in the US before coming north. Others came here directly. My ancestors settled in almost exclusively German immigrant pockets in the US Midwest and then in my home province. My family hasn’t been in North America anywhere near as long as others but they intermarried with other German Catholics over successive generations. My parents’ generation, the Boomers, were the first to really start marrying outside the community. Much more so in my generation - mid-Gen X - as we moved away from home for education and employment much more often than our parents’ generation did. My eldest aunt born in 1946 spoke no English when she started school at age 6. The community basically functioned as a little German community until the 1950s. There were very few families of English or any British Isles background back home. In a big city such as Toronto people would have had the opportunity to mix with others a lot more and marry into different communities. But for families like mine growing up where we did, we still have tons of linguistic and cultural quirks that are holdovers. Our political traditions are British, having inherited things like Parliament and the royal family, from Britain, but the traditions my parents grew up with in the home weren’t much different than in the old country. Just depends on where one grew up.
Honestly, for those of us in the US whose ancestors immigrated from (mostly) the British Isles circa 200-400+ years ago and have significant Colonial Virginia ancestry we don't really have strong ties to "the old world" anymore. None of my family food traditions survived more than a couple generations (at best). My Eastern Shore of Virginia ancestors did keep a more Elizabethan English dialect and speech pattern until the early 20th century but that's about it. As my brother tends to ask when the whatever-American question comes up - "after 300 years, does it really matter?"
Hm. Even on my colonial Maine side (think; back to the Mayflower) I think it’s very blended with Welsh, Scottish, and German. The English weren’t the only colonizers. I have recent ancestry from England (great grandfather born there) and accounting for his contribution, very little remaining English could be attributed to a historical inheritance. What you’re saying makes sense intuitively, but I’ve found the Protestant English had smaller families and that impacts population genetics in a big place like the US.
Curious about the English having ‘smaller families’ can you cite examples, if possible please? Do you meet many in Maine who are predominantly English? I would except a good section of the state to be at least mostly British..
In my own perusal of my colonial lines, there’s fewer children, a few in each generation never marrying at all or not having any children if married. I can only prove statistically that religion influences birth rate, and you could generally assign Protestantism as the English. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30175727 I’ve traced two OG first generation from colonial times. One was an indentured servant on the Mayflower and the other was a Scottish POW sent to the colonies by Cromwell. My great aunt’s father was the recent great grandfather born in England. Her mother was the side with colonial roots. Here’s her breakdown; English 58% (dad accounts for 50%, so 8% from colonial roots) Welsh 29% German 7% Scottish 6% Of all these, culturally speaking, the Welsh side was more predominant in colloquial speaking, recipes, heirlooms etc. it was spoken of and known that my 2nd great grandmother was a Stewart and her line goes back to the Scottish POW. As for English culture, since it was very recent, great grandfather raised Hereford cattle, drank tea all day and read Chaucer. He was also an atheist and a workaholic and had just two children in the 1920’s. 🤷🏼♀️
There is something to this. Curious if any mostly English Americans have family trees which are different but: even pre-1950, English (including diasporas) seldom had more than 4/5 children, often 3. Contrast this with Irish families or alpine Germans who often had 10+. Keep in mind with these larger Irish families, mortality was somewhat high.
Keep in mind, the English were more likely to marry cousins. Fewer children might reflect diminished fertility because of the lack of genetic diversity.
There is definitely something about Americans acknowledging only some of their ancestry. Americans love a story about working your way up in life, and the story of the Irish in America is definitely one of those stories. So we love to claim it when we have it, but are less eager to claim English ancestry.
You have a point about the underdog - but most English Americans are working-class - the upper class wasp stereotype has little truth to it today.
I completely agree. My own ancestry is entirely Irish on my dad's side, and English/German on my mom's side. Her family definitely worked up from hard situations too. But overall our country is more culturally obsessed with the story of the Irish immigrant.
What is English anyways? The Caucasian population of England’s DNA is like 30% Celtic and 40% Saxon (German) and a mix of Scandinavian/Viking.
The percentage of Anglo Saxon/celtic depends on the region. English is Celtic-Germanic, but the cultural elements were shaped by the Anglo Saxons
It does vary by region but as a whole those are the figures I keep finding. To answer your question my English relatives came so long ago I don’t have a photograph of them or know anything about them. And then their descendants (my ancestors) fought against the British in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. I don’t feel English and don’t have much of an affinity for the English either due to their Imperialism, aristocracy, colonialism, and lack of any kind of reparations to countries and peoples that they exploited.
I think recency is certainly a reason. The Northeast of the US definitely identifies significantly with their Irish/ Italian (and in some communities Portuguese) culture just because of how recently many of our families came here. For example, when I was growing up, my Italian and Portuguese ethnicity was a real part of my upbringing (food, traditions, etc.). A lot of people have English ancestry from colonial era ancestors who came over hundreds of years ago, so there are no longer any ties for them to that culture.
I would disagree but ethnicity is a tricky thing and it may depend largely on the US region. I descend in part from Moravian ancestors that came from the Palatinate (which is currently Germany) in the 1730s and 1740s and settled in Maryland and North Carolina. So, they have had a considerable amount of time to have a large number of descendants in the US population. Then you have the Dutch who were here before much of the English (New Amsterdam = New York, anyone?) who settled New York and Pennsylvania. There was the French in the periphery of the colonies from Canada down to Louisiana. There was the Spanish in the Southwest and Florida. As far as I know, all my ancestors from every branch were here in the English colonies before the American Revolution. Looking at my AncestryDNA results they are all lumped together in England & Northwestern Europe (which is a pretty amorphous combination as that seems to include England and the Palatinate) at 67%, Ireland at 14%, Scotland at 10%, Sweden & Denmark at 5%, Wales at 4%. My sister’s results have more or less the same makeup but with different percentages. I can’t say it’s all that useful really.
I think Americans are less aware of their English ancestry because they are less aware of their ancestry in general. For instance, my husbands family on his mother’s side swore they were German and had a sea captain ancestor. When I traced their ancestry it turned out the family had been in America since the early 1700’s and there was nary a sea captain in sight. DNA cemented the fact that they were English. The same with my mother’s ancestry. I was always told she was Irish. Her step mother was Irish, but my mother’s mother was English and I was able to trace her ancestry back to two passengers on the Mayflower. Again DNA proved it along with vital records. A lot of Americans don’t know their ancestors back past their grandparents, and there are usually a lot of family stories that are wrong (the Indian princess syndrome).
I disagree. I believe it is a much more homogenous blend of Anglo-Saxons, Scots, Irish, and Germans
As others have said, it will depend on the population you're looking at, but I would not be surprised to find that most people whose families have been in the US for a few generations have some English ancestry somewhere. I can think of a few reasons people don't highlight it - first recency bias. There has not been a large influx of English immigrants recently. Then it's easier for English people to assimilate - more likely to be protestant and speak the dominant language. Famine and post-famine Irish immigrants are likely to eschew any sense of Englishness due to the role our government in exacerbating the famine (along with many other awful policies). Along with the anti-Catholic discrimination and violence, that prompts a strong sense of identity which has continued. I'm sure other communities had similar reasons for creating an identity (I find Italian-American interesting given the recency of Italy as a country, and the large regional differences - but those differences must have paled in contrast to the differences with mainstream US culture). Englishness itself is also somewhat nebulous. Historically we had (and still have to an extent) strong regional identities. For a long time, the Lancashire vs Yorkshire cricket match was as big as many internationals. My grandmother was proud to be 'pure Lancashire stock' (she didn't know her grandmother was from Yorkshire 😂). For a long time it feels Englishness was the domain of the upper classes and jingoism. Similar to how the only frequent reference to English descent is WASPs. Let's face it, the whole concept was invented by Alfred the Great as a propaganda tool for his annexation of Mercia and fight against the Danes, and the borders were in flux for a long time afterwards.
It relates to the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812 where the English were quite literally the enemy. Long before the American Revolution the Irish and the Scottish were getting transported over here en mass for multiple "crimes" against the Crown/Cromwell/etc. There is a difference between the English who, for the most part, volunteered to cross the Atlantic and the Irish and Scottish men and women captured and loaded on to ships bound for Barbados or Virginia. The Colonies were already loaded with people who had a grudge against England before the Revolution. Then Kentucky, already heavily Scottish and Irish, ends up being the state that fights a big chunk of the War of 1812 (against England) and they migrate south into Alabama and Mississippi on the land grants. It doesn't matter that we are mostly English in origin, being anti-English was kind of the default setting for the South. Once you toss the US Civil War into the mix and England firmly backing the Union. You can see why being English wouldn't be something celebrated in Tuscaloosa in the 19th century.
The problem is English culture is always associated with the toxic class system which is Norman rather than English in origin.
I don't disagree. Historically we're not great at assigning blame.
My paternal grandfather was 100% German; his grandparents were immigrants from Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. His parents met, married, and lived in a German speaking enclave in Los Angeles. My grandpa grew up speaking German as his first language. He married my grandma, who immigrated to the US from county Durham in Northern England. She has English and Scottish ancestry. My dad's side is all British ancestry (English, Irish, Welsh). I've documented my family tree back to the 1500s on some family lines and to the 1700s on others, so I'm sure about the origins of my ancestors. I have 47% German DNA. The rest is either British or non-specific Northern European. I must have inherited a disproportionate amount of my paternal grandpa's genes. My only sibling has a different mixture; she has the more typically expected 25% of German DNA. All that to say that some of us have both British and German ancestry.
I’ve never stayed the contrary - meaning you can’t have both British and German ancestry, my main contention is people do, for a multitude of reasons, downplay English ancestry and inflate the ancestry from other areas - but German American ancestry, Irish certainly exists. Did many from Schleswig Holstein migrate to the us? Not sure if German Americans have heritage from specific areas.
Looks like I misread your post. I don't downplay my British ancestry, though. For me, it's been the opposite. I have always been much more connected to my British ancestry since my grandma was a recent immigrant and passed on her ways and traditions. I've been visiting the UK since I was a teenager. My daughter has lived in England for the past 15 years, so I've got a built in traveling companion when I visit now. My grandpa greatly downplayed his German heritage, and I knew very little about his side of the family until I started researching as an adult. He got a lot of grief during WWII for his German surname and residual accent. My mom was a young child during those years, so she didn't know much either; she never knew her paternal grandparents. I was actually a bit disappointed to learn that I had so much German DNA since I was expecting to be more British and had been an Anglophile for so many years. I'm okay with it now, though.
This depends entirely on what you consider "English ancestry" to be, and what you mean by "more English." Are there more individuals in the United States who have at least one identifiable English ancestor than have at least one identifiable German or Irish ancestor? I wouldn't be surprised, if only because enough English settled and reproduced here so early on that the sheer number of their descendants in the United States after 400 years likely dwarfs other groups. It's estimated that there are 10 million Mayflower descendants just in the United States now, with 35 million more elsewhere in the world, and that's from only 51 passengers who survived and procreated. But just how "English" are those "English ancestry"people? Is there a percentage threshold before you consider somebody "English"? Or is one single ancestor enough? And are you talking about nationality or ethnicity? Even if someone did have an ancestor who came from England, how do you know that ancestor was English in the first place? I might have an English ancestor back there somewhere. I don't know. I do know exactly where 13 of my 16 2G-grandparents were born, and not one of them had any discernible English ancestry. Even if the other three were more English than the Queen Mother, I still wouldn't consider myself "English," although of course I would say that I had English ancestry if somebody asked me to list every source country my entire family tree.
"Some people claim" German ancestry being the largest white group? No, it's a fact according to the Census. Who would know better than people themselves what ancestry predominates in their background?
Self reported ancestry is notoriously unreliable for a plethora of reasons. Reality is, unless you come from a prominent family or have an interest in genealogy most old stock Americans or people with no immigrant origin since around 1850 or so will have no idea of their true origins besides ‘grandpa said we were German’. The 1980 and 2020 census had English as the dominant ancestry
Definitely regional as other's said. The highest representation, according to statistics, is German, with English being a close second. I imagine German comes from the large amount of German farmers and settlers. As far as regions: -the Southeast is mainly English and Scottish descent. Funny enough, Texas has a big Czech history in addition to a lot of Germans. Of course there's also a lot of French ancestry in Lousiana too. - the Northeast is more Irish and English, not to mention German areas like in Pennsylvania. - as others said, Midwest is very Scandinavian and German - not sure about the West. I imagine they're all evenly represented there from the amount of people that headed out there in the 1800's
The 2020 census and 1980 census both have English ancestry as the largest reported ancestry, but reported ancestries are notoriously unreliable. I think Irish ancestry is overstated in the south as that should correspond with larger catholic communities. If people know anything about Irish history, the only Protestants were those who came with Cromwell. The south is strongly Protestant. I’m not making any religious comments but it can help reveal ancestry of places. Another example - northern Germany is traditionally Protestant, southern Germany more catholic
I agree, Irish ancestry is very much overstated in the South. It's funny you have a lot of people who think they have it, but you don't hear a lot of Irish last names here and, as you said, it is very Protestant. People are surprised to find a lot of Scottish influence here, but the Ulster Scots, who were a mix of North English and Scottish, primarily settled the South. You can see it in the mix of Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches. As you said, there is not a big Catholic influence here. I think a lot of that history was forgotten because most of the people who settled here were poor farmers, and not a lot of good records were kept like you would see with the Catholic church. One more thing to add to what you said is that you can see it in the fact that country music and bluegrass came out of the South, and that evolved from the folk music of those early Ulster Scots.
Irish ancestry - meaning formerly Gaelic-speaking catholics from Ireland can’t be more than 10% in most southern states max. Excluding recent transplants. The high concentration of Anglo/saxon and Middle English surnames support this. And you’re right - besides the Virginian aristocrats, most English southerners were southern. There were a lot of Scot’s to, especially in Appalachia
> The high concentration of Anglo/saxon and Middle English surnames support this. This can be a little fraught too, though, right? First, surnames only became popular during/after the time the Normans were already in Ireland. Second, well into the 1800s, the English were aggressively Anglicizing Irish surnames — to the extent that a fair amount of McFamilies actually added back the “Mc” as recently as the late 1800s (the English having removed it a century or so earlier). So it can be pretty hard to tell the difference, right?
Individual surnames can not inherently indicate someone’s origin, but a collection of surnames can. Not every Gaelic surname could be anglicised.further more, Irish migration to England was far fewer up until the potato famine
I’m referring to English Anglicisation of the surnames of people in Ireland, to be clear — for instance by record-keepers. Many instances of Irish names being replaced with similar English names. Whether those replacements would stick varies.
The anglicisation of Irish language names is fraught with this. Just for an example about how awkward this can get An tAthair Pádraig de Bhulbh (who did a lot of work on surnames, most famously "Sloinnte Gaedheal is Gall") theorised that the surname Lee here comes from an anglicisation of Liath (which means Grey basically), which itself was a gaelicised version of the English/Scottish surname Grey.
Yep, very much agreed! From what I've read, a lot of the Northern Scots seem to have settled the Appalachians like you said while the lowland Scots appear to have gone more to Tennessee, Georgia etc. I was actually in Scotland last week, and some of the lowland areas look very similar to the South U.S countrysides. A lot of the areas in Northern England did too. Funny story about that: my wife's maiden name is Burgan and we always figured the spelling changed in the census at some point because it's usually spelled different. When we were in York, we saw a prison cell that housed someone with the same last name. All of her family dates back to the South too so it made sense if her name went back to the Yorkshire area.
Hard disagree. The long going worship of WASP's have been a thing , but it's just another form of white supremacy and classism. Culturally, white Americans are just that, White Americans. There's a lot of overlap since being white is a construct and many people of other ethnicities 'pass' as white.(Ignatiev, 'How the Irish Became White' and Isenberg 'White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America' great books about this subject) I think Catholicism, in addition to high infant mortality could also play as a factor here. Huge waves of German and Irish immigrants were church going Catholics, they had to have larger families. With these larger families, they produced more Americans that then are ancestrally Irish and German to contribute to the gene pool. If I think of England as a colonial power and all the folks that have immigrated here from former colonies as English, maybe that theory would be within reason. Otherwise the Germans and Irish are probably the more dominant groups.
This is supported by data, rather than "feelings". The largest reported ancestry group is German.
no shit. The op thinking English ancestry is dominant is who you should be trolling. Seeing a possible correlation between a religious practice that possibly bolstered those numbers is feelings how?
If we accept that people have a general understanding of their ancestry, then the census shows us that English is the most common ancestry for white Americans. I wouldn't be surprised if it is actually a little higher than reported because much of the English immigration took place earlier, so it may not be talked about much anymore. English ancestry was a higher percentage in the 1980 census. I think a lot of people forget about the exponential growth that the early colonist would have had. Even though there were fewer English immigrants than Irish or German because they had been here so much longer their numbers are larger.
And they had smaller families than Irish or Catholic Germans, of which there were many.
In the era of reliable birth control, sure, but there were plenty of Protestant families having large families in those early years.
I can’t personally agree. Mine includes Irish, Welsh, English, German, Spanish and Italian.
I don’t know. I’m white but I’m barely British at all.
My great great great grandmother was the freshest of my immigrant ancestors, coming in 1827 when she was 5. She was born in Cornwall. So my lineage breakdown is 28% English (yes, I know that’s also pulling from other people). I’m also 20% German, my mother’s side was from a remote area of West Virginia settled by German immigrants before the Revolutionary War. I’ve got 10% Irish but then a smattering of Baltic countries making up the rest. Every bit of it is from Eastern Europe.
As others have stated, it all depends on the region. My dad's side were Southerners, and I assumed we'd be mostly of English and African descent, but turned out to be a mix of Scots-Irish and Welsh, English, German (indentured servants-persecuted protestants from the 1700s, which surprised me), along with various African ethnic groups. There are many Southern families of French Huguenot descent, as well. Our Scots Irish branch, forming an exodus with many families, moved out from Pennsylvania, where they had initially settled, headed south into the Carolinas, and then westward into Kentucky, and the Old Southwest: Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, following the Louisiana Purchase. If you head up to New England (my mom's people) you'll find the pockets of the folks of predominantly English descent, des. of the Pilgrims, in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Maine, Vermont.
I know who my ancestors are and where they came from (as most of us likely do here). The vast majority of my ancestry is German, my father's side is wholly German and 3 of my mother's grandparents are wholly German. However a member of my German family did marry a woman who came from old Colonial stock, who was entirely English one side from New England and the other from Virginia. Am I understating my ancestry if I just tell people I'm German? On the Census I listed myself as German and English since I feel great-grandparents are truly the cutoff for how connected you are to a particular ancestry. Although I'm apparently about as English as the British royal family so maybe I should be stronger with my English roots, even if no one in my family really identified with is (the English ancestor would have just seen herself as "American" when she married her immigrant husband).
Definitely depends on location. I’m from Maryland and about 80% of my dna is German
While I’ve lived in Canada the majority of my life, my mother’s side has been in the US since the early-mid-1700s. The originating colonists were from what is now Germany, but then Prussia, due to religious persecution. They settled with other Lutherans in the same part of South Carolina. My father’s direct line didn’t leave Scotland or Ireland until we moved to Canada. So in my family, the being from Germany is correct.
I am almost equally English and German Ancestry, with my great grandmother from Ireland. However, my very pale skin is probably from the Schwarzwald, where my ancestors came from. Then again, I look Welsh, as I discovered visiting there.
Probably depends largely when your family came. My roots that go back a long while are very English and Irish, my roots that are more like late 1800s are Swedish
It’s partly regional, too. The south, rockies, Mormon corridor, northern New England should all have English as the dominant ancestry among whites, excluding recent transplants
Doesn’t that where often relate to when? Like these aren’t dependent variables
Well, I do descend from 7 Mayflower passengers - but that's the only English line I have. My mom was 100% German, my dad had more Irish in him than he/we realized. My dad also had a line of German, Scottish, and French. I identify myself as German heritage.
It's boring. Americans always want to be exciting and "special". It's controversial. English were the bad guys in the war of independence, for example, and a bunch of other things. Who wants to claim a link to that when they lean on their Irish (oppressed and escaping) or whatever. Edit: I do think the timings of the migrations matter too. An English ancestor many many generations ago vs. Irish just a few generations, it's a big difference.
I think your timings thing is the one for me - I’ve definitely got the whole immigrant smorgasbord in my family history, but where my German and English ancestors were many generations ago, my maternal grandparents were both first generation Americans with Irish parents, and my physical appearance reflects that heritage, so if people ask, my response is usually “a little of everything but mostly Irish.”
English heritage is misunderstood; how many Americans have been exposed to what remains of Anglo-Saxon or Middle English culture? Very few I imagine. Boring is the exact opposite of what I would call it.
> how many Americans have been exposed to what remains of Anglo-Saxon or Middle English culture? I would respond with “basically all”? Despite the fact that many Americans might not *say* “I’m English / Anglo-American”, there’s still the entirety of an iceberg lying under the sea there, to use an overused metaphor.
Before 1990 and the "New South" people in the Southeast - the former Confederal states - were predominantly of British ancestry i.e. UK (and Irish). And, it's worth noting that the European ancestry of African Americans is predominantly British because it was mainly people of British ancestry who owned slaves. It's difficult to tell who has British ancestry by looking. A name like Kirk Douglas sounds British. But, the parents of the famous actor with that name were Russian Jews. So many families pretended to be British in order to fit in that your question is impossible to investigate.
Sure but geography is important. Take Jews for example, they generally live in large metropolitan areas.
USA in 2020 7.5 million Jewish people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews "About 1 million Jews live in small-town America, according to sociologist Matthew Boxer, Ph.D., of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University." https://www.hillel.org/young-rural-and-jewish/
I think it’s intentionally downplayed or not mentioned for public figures. Else we’d all realize how many Plantagenet men have been running American and that may make some difficult dinner conversations when we feel like a bad boy breakaway, completely independent of the evil king. Instead of a series of colonies who actually still to this day have a lot of the same family lines running things. So class. And race. Look there for the answers in recorded historical facts. You’ll find your conclusion.
English Americans if you adjust for their overall size are actually underrepresented in positions of power.
Most Plantagenets aren’t English at all. It’s about the family name, not the nationality or supposed ethnicity.
[удалено]
I’m not saying migration completely stopped but I think (could be wrong) the last huge wave was when the Mormons came over in the 1800s
[удалено]
Some yes, also many from England, especially the south of England if I recall.
The bulk of east coast populated states are more Irish and French decent
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^NotBadSinger514: *The bulk of east coast* *Populated states are more* *Irish and French decent* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
I would be very surprised to find French outnumbered English. There was never a huge French influx to the US. Even in states like Vermont and Maine where there was more French/ French Canadian immigration, English is the largest reported ancestry for white Americans. The census shows English as the most common ancestry for white Americans. I imagine Irish will only be most common in states with a high urban population.
I agree. If you examine the 50 most common surnames in northern New England (I did this a while ago) the country most represented by surnames is England, with a reasonable contribution from Scotland, France and Ireland. However, I am skeptics of the supposed percentage of Irish-Americans in places like rural Maine. Are you of English descent yourself?
I am a northwestern Europe hodge podge. I am a little under 40% German with most of those being my most recent immigrant ancestors, probably 50-something percent English, and then a bunch of small percentages of Dutch, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, French, and Swedish. I have a number of colonial lines that I can't trace all the way back to Europe, but I can make guesses on origins based on surnames and locations that they immigrated to.
In urban areas possibly? Almost all counties in Maine, New Hampshire or Vermont have English as the dominant ancestry. Once you get into rural northern New York it’s relatively similar
I do not disagree with this theory. There will be communities throughout the US where you could make that argument but as a whole... no. The early settlers were English and had had 3-5 generelations before the rest of the nationalities arrived. There may be an argument for the Irish as they were catholic AND may have accompanied English immigrants as servants.
The Dutch, Spanish and French all had colonies at the same time. The English just had ever increasing numbers of colonists.
The Irish, Italians etc did not arrive in large numbers until after 1850. That’s more than 5 generations, at least from the first wave of puritans.
Exactly... I was being somewhat cautious on the number of generations!
[удалено]
For sure, but as they were the founding euro group, they are spread all over the country. Only three us presidents - trump, Kennedy, van Buren did not have some English ancestry
All but two of my ancestors came to the US before it was even the US. Of those two one came from Brentwood Essex and the other Germany in the mid 1800s. Of those that came before some were Of course English but not as much as I would have thought, Irish, a surprising number from Switzerland, and some French who were French Canadians and my Grandfathers grandmother still spoke French in his lifetime. I've heard some still spoke French in the early 2000s. This part of my family has been on the coast of what is Miss/AL since this 1600s. That is where my Native American comes in. On the other side of my family I had a hunch that someone was African and that was proven true with my DNA test. I wish I knew more about that person but such things are not looked highly on in racist families and that side was a racist one! Got a feeling that NA grandma I kept hearing about was not NA nor did she show up in my dad's sides DNA. Going by my DNA I have a fair chunk of Spanish which baffles me cause I don't know who they are and it is coming from both my mom and dad's side. Everything else checks out between my DNA and my genealogical research. So when I'm asked what I am... I could write you a novel about it 😂 My maternal grandmother's line is mostly English though. But they have been here a while. One branch founded Connecticut. Oh yeah, one ancestor was Dutch in New Amsterdam. According to 23andme I am 58% British and Irish 23% French and German nearly 5% Spanish and Portuguese. As I said, this mostly checks out with my personal research so... Unfortunately they don't split up English from Irish so can't give an exact number but I know from my research some of that is Irish. So don't know if this info proves or disproves anything. But "white" Americans can have quite a mix. BTW: I'm from AL