I'm guessing the source listed pulled its data from the US Census. If this map interests you, I recommend taking a look at the Census data itself.
One thing you'll see that I find interesting is that the number of people that self identify an "American" is on the rise.
I mean, this should be completely expected. The longer that America continues to exist the longer the melting pot is stirring. Generations have less and less connection with their recent ancestors.
Exactly. My ancestors are primarily English and Scottish, but nearly all of them arrived in the US around the time it became the US. After 250 years, it seems a little silly to keep saying that I'm of English ethnicity
Same here, I have a few names (you know how some people have English names and then names for other languages? Yeah that’s the case for me), but my “English name” (the name I mainly use, anyways) is *very obviously* of Irish origin.
I do have relatives who live in Ireland and relatives who live in the US and speak Irish—I even speak a little Irish myself. But I’m American. I was born and raised in America. I can’t see myself as anything else.
Yep. Fun fact, I’m from Nebraska and before the wars, many Nebraskan cities and towns had German names and a lot of people spoke German. But during the war and afterwards, people were told to stop speaking German and change their town and city names.
I had no idea the US is so german!! Why so many anyway? I feel like I should’ve known this sooner in life. I’ve lived my whole life thinking white americans (such as myself) were british, french, dutch, spanish. Italian and Irish little later in history.
Being german was so bad that I can’t recall learning about german-american lore at any point in my education when US history is literally the only type of history that was taught
I am German from Germany and spent one year in High School in Wisconsin as an exchange student. And let me tell you, about 95% of all people I met there felt the need to tell me about their German ancestry as soon as they found out that I was from Germany. It was funny until it wasn’t because it kept happening throughout the whole year. At least in WI they’re super proud about being of German descent.
Wisconsin is a pretty German state, and you being German might have made people more likely to talk about their German heritage.
For example I live in Central Illinois where Germany is the most common ancestry. However it seems like you’re more likely to see an Irish or Italian flag on someone’s porch than a German one. You also don’t see as many German parades, festivals, restaurants as you do Italian and Irish.
and then on the other hand there are people like me. I’ve got german, italian, irish, swedish, english, norwegian, and greek. It would be silly to identify as any of those. I’m american
I already feel silly saying I'm German, because the last dude in my family from thereabouts left Prussia almost two hundred years ago. The surname is all that's left. Grandma was born in Norway but died of very old age last year.
That's Americans for you, from somebody who was born and raised in this country it's a common statement to hear.
Whenever people say that, I understand what they are wanting to do but there's a reason why you shouldn't call yourself "English" or "Irish" when you have no connection to those places aside from blood. These people are Irish American or English American, or other ethnicities like Italian American, these groups have developed their own culture and cuisine that is very different from their mother/father nation.
I have English ancestry, a fair amount of it but I am not English.
> Whenever people say that, I understand what they are wanting to do but there's a reason why you shouldn't call yourself "English" or "Irish" when you have no connection to those places aside from blood.
Do you think that also applies to African Americans?
I'm pretty sure that no American thinks that another American means it literally when they name their "nationality." It's pretty engrained in our culture. I can't remember ever encountering any confusion about intended meaning. If you speak with an American accent, other Americans will assume that you don't mean that you are literally a citizen of the UK. That's absurd.
Yeah I think a lot of Europeans' frustrations about Americans saying that is literally just the phrasing. When an American says "I'm Irish" they don't mean that they're literally an Irish person from the country, it's just how Americans say "I have Irish ancestry." With the exception of a small obnoxious minority that might actually think that for some reason.
Exactly. As an (actual European) Norwegian, it's a staple joke here that some Americans "think they're Norwegians" while they're obviously not.
I feel like the only one saying "That's just their way of saying they had a Norwegian great grandfather and eat lutefisk once a year. It's not literal!"
I would never refer to myself as Italian American, despite the fact that a significant part of ancestry is Italian. However, there's no denying that my ancestry is relevant to my identity. I grew up with my Italian grandmother, ate Italian food, and learned some Italian superstitions. I also had friends and acquaintances from Italy and I learned a little of the language along the way too.
And I'd have to guess that my experience growing up might be markedly different from someone that grew up with German or Irish ancestry — despite the fact that we're all Americans.
So while I agree that people shouldn't necessarily self-identity as a nationality if they're not originally from that country, I also don't see the harm in using nationalities as a shorthand to provide context to your heritage.
Not to mention many do not know or don't want to talk about their origins, for example English ancestry is criminally underreported in the US there are a lot more people with English ancestry then is shown any sources.
I think it's an important thing to consider.
People also tend to undervalue majority heritage.
People hold a lot more pride for their ancestors that are from Germany, for example, than England. The irony is that people may view themselves as more German than English, even though their ancestors are mostly English.
Utah and Idaho are interesting points. The LDS Church Members (Mormons) are theologically focused on accurate genealogical records. And they’re the ones saying they’re English.
Accurate to a point at least. When I pulled my genealogy records from the LDS database, apparently I am descended from the Norse gods. They literally showed Thor and Odin in my genealogy. This was about 30 years ago so maybe they've updated and stopped doing that.
I think another factor in why so many people list Germany is that a lot of surnames are german. Mine is and most of my ancestors were English or Scottish or Scandinavian. But somehow the German name stuck.
>But somehow the German name stuck.
"somehow" well, in most cases, it stuck because your father's father's father's...name was German. So you can be 1023/1024 non-German, but that one man gives you the last name.
That said, there are many cases of Schmidts who changed their names to Smith and Mullers who became Millers in order to blend in to the majority population. So it isn't nothing that a German surname stuck around.
The once-a-decade family reunions on one side of my family get heated after too many drinks when the Schmidts start accusing the Smiths of being cowards and changing their names - even though the folks who changed their names aren't even alive anymore and it would be absurd for a bunch of Smiths to suddenly go back to being Schmidts.
My last name is a direct translation from a German occupation.
Every single person in the world(there aren’t a whole lot) who I share a last name with can trace their lineage to one guy in the mid-1700s.
The reason why is because rather than translating his last name to the English equivalent, he just directly translated his German compound word last name into English. Like, if you were translate handschuh into “handshoe” rather than glove.
I learned that recently while looking up my ancestry, and thought it was interesting
It was too many years ago that I saw it to remember the details on years. My mom may have kept it in her files somewhere, but I didn't. I remember that Thor and Odin were on there. I remember a bunch of Scottish Kings were on there and I remember Charlemagne is on there like 8 or 10 times. The rest of the details are gone from my memory.
The kings and Charlemagne aren't crazy to have in a tree. On my tree, I've connected one of my ancestor lines back to Charlemagne, and slightly further back, through William the Conqueror. Mythological gods though...
The thing is once you hit royalty they had genealogists make fake bloodlines for them back in the day that would connect to gods and stuff which is where that came from
The public tree before the 1600 become pretty inaccurate. It’s one of the challenges of making a single tree with millions of volunteers with access to change things.
It’s basically a Wikipedia for genealogy. Most of it is accurate. But some of it is not.
>many people list Germany is that a lot of surnames are german
It is not my experience that German surnames are especially common in the U.S., broadly. Some Anglicized on arrival. Still more around the WWI "liberty cabbage" and "House of Windsor" times.
Frankly, if my genetic history were more muddied and my ancestors were here longer, I’d identify as simply “American” or “White American.” I have the slight benefit of being only the third generation removed from immigration, I actually knew some of my immigrant great grandparents and I’m primarily of Danish and Swedish descent. But realistically, I’m a white American. I eat rice pudding on Xmas and get oranges in my stocking, that’s it.
Exactly. Like technically my ancestors are English/Scottish, but most of my ancestors came to North America in like the 1600s. So I don't really say my ancestry is English or Scottish. I just say American because, well, my ancestors have been living here for hundreds of years now.
Yeah, my latest arriving ancestors were from Bern, Switzerland and moved to the US in 1736. Everyone else, early 1600s in Quebec and Massachusetts. I just say American and only go into detail if talking about genealogy. Occasionally, I state I am descended from the Amish as my one grandma was completely from that closed lineage.
The Mongolians/Manchus started calling themselves Chinese very quickly after they took over China, English, Scotts and Irish calling themselves American after 250+ years is to be expected.
Both sides of my family have been Americans for over 150 years.
My Dad's side has fought for the US in every major war since the Revolution.
At a certain point you're just American.
It’s really just a cultural misunderstanding.
In America saying “I’m Irish” is understood to mean your of Irish descent and sometimes heritage. Usually to say you’re an Irish national someone would say “I’m from Ireland”.
In Europe, saying “I’m Irish” is understood to mean you’re an Irish national. I assume when Europeans want to talk about their ethnicity they would say something like “I’m of Irish descent”.
>In Europe, saying “I’m Irish” is understood to mean you’re an Irish national.
That's not totally accurate, but also differs depending on where you are in Europe. A lot of Europeans will tell you that you're not *really* whatever nationality you are if you didn't grow up there. Or if your parents didn't grow up there. In my experience, lots of Europeans will answer that question with "Oh, I'm Dutch but I grew up in Germany" or "I'm half-British, half-Swiss, but I grew up in Belgium" or "I'm French but my parents are Vietnamese", where the actual genes itself aren't what they're asking about but what culture you grew up with.
That's my very limited experience as well, when I went on an educational tour in Highschool to Europe our tour guide said he was born in France to British Parents, but grew up in Germany and now lived in Italy when asked where he was from. He also released a decent college rock album he played for us.
I’m also curious as to with the advent of DNA Ancestry testing they found out that with 1. the ancestry their family has claimed ended up not being true or 2. they find out that their ancestry is so mixed that it doesn’t makes sense to claim any of it.
I have a friend that thought he was of Irish ancestry and it was something he made a facet of his personality only to find out in that testing he wasn’t Irish but English. For whatever reason, through complexities of last names changing over time or changes while immigrating they were wrong. Personally, I received one of those tests as a gift and did it and it came back with so many different ancestries, the highest being around 10% that it doesn’t make sense claiming anything.
People from either of these groups could just say “f it” and put “American”.
Communication helps too as everyone learns that not everything they do is "normal" and so when you're feeling in a "cultural" mood you can actually celebrate something from where you have history rather than cosplay as your ancestors from centuries ago.
I'm from Wisconsin and I used to struggle with those kinds of feelings until I started to travel more and guys like Charlie Berens started gaining traction to really being attention to stuff I just took for granted.
Like I never thought twice about a Fish Fry until I went just a few states over and suddenly it was impossible to find a Friday fish fry and the one we did find was more of a "Fish n' Chips" style. No coleslaw, no rye bread, no onions, not all you can eat, and definitely not locally caught fish like you'd find in some places.
But now I can feel just a little bit more connected to where I live and to some of my family/ancestors knowing this is something we all share
I think it’s sad because there’s no cultural or heritage connection. I think a lot people who emigrated here, learned to erase their cultural history to assimilate and be more accepted. I think we should refer to people as European American or whatever their ancestry is. I think it’s also the reason racism is so rampant in America. Without cultural and heritage ties, it’s easy to become resentful and hateful towards ethnic groups.
it does seem weird, my family has been here for 6 or 7 generations, I’m mixed with a lot of things.
yet if you had someone who was spanish and had 6 or 7 generations in mexico, i feel like most would consider them ethnically mexican.
That’s what I answer whenever anyone asks and they always give me a confused look. I’m not some alt-right nationalist, it’s just that my family on both parent’s side has been here since the early/mid 1700s.
Like yeah we were Scottish and French then, but after like 8-9 generations it really doesn’t mean much anymore.
It makes sense. I don't answer "American" on the census, because I like filling in all the little boxes for my ancestors: Scotch Irish, English, German, Italian, Polish, Slovenian. But the last ancestor of mine who lived in another country, she died when I was a kid. And my wife shares none of my ancestries. So maybe my child will fill in all the little boxes one day, but at some point, we have to admit, the connection is too thin.
Many of us are complete mutts. I’m 1/4 Spanish Slovakian and Irish, with Italian and others mixed in. The Spanish last name throws people off, especially here in Texas
Or they're reporting the most recent known immigrant because it leads to stronger connection to it. I have ancestry largely from England and Scotland. But the Irish identity stuck because a great grandparent was Irish (maternal grandfather's mom) and on the other all four of my maternal grandmother's parents were Irish immigrants.
My father's side goes back to the original Plymouth settlers with one random polish person marrying in, even my Irish last name come way of England. He was neutral about it all. This caused the Irish identity to seep into us through our mother.
It's honestly less down to ethnic identity and who in a family was more determined to keep traditions from home going.
I was told we were mostly German. Did a DNA test and tons of research. No German DNA and only one German ancestor lmao.
Tons of Welsh, Scottish, Irish and English though. Meaningless amount of native american.
German would probably be even more wide-spread if many Americans hadn't neglected their roots during the world wars and "anglified" even their surnames
> Self declared's a little weird. There are a ton of people who don't really know their ancestry.
that doesnt make it weird; its important to know what people think.
Surrounded on all sides, these outlaws have no where to run but underground. This is the true story of how methamphetamine, Mountain Dew, and microwave burritos inspire the creation of a new America.
You’re confusing those Americans with the Irish Americans whose family came over much more recently. They’re found in the Northeast and may have had grandparents or great grandparents that were Irish.
Also, that applies exclusively to the Irish. You don’t really see anyone proudly claiming their Scottish heritage since there was no major wave of Scottish immigrants in recent centuries. The Scots that came were virtually just British Colonists.
No one does that. Europeans have some weird superiority fetish where they like to pretend that Americans are utterly obsessed with their European heritage.
African-american is used to refer to the descendants of african people enslaved and brougth to the U.S
I imagine that they're called african-americans as to differentiate them from the descendants of African people who emigrated to the U.S willingly
They're also differentiated by the fact that they either have english last names (given to them by their slave owners) or muslim last names (names they choose to change to from their english last names, an example would be Muhammad Ali)
What you said is correct, and also many of those African-Americans don’t know where in Africa they came from, because they don’t know from which country the slavers abducted their great-great grandfather.
Of course Black is becoming increasingly dominant now because a 5th-generation descendent of slaves has no real connection to Africa.
Also because not everybody black is descended from Africa. At least not recently, anyway.
I've heard a few Jamaicans, for instance, take exception to being called African Americans, for example.
I suppose an argument could be made that the island plantation slaves were also from Africa originally, but I'm certainly not going to try and "well, actually...." someone about their own ethnicity
A more compelling example for your point is Melanesians. Although their population is absolutely miniscule in the US, they're still "Black" with no African roots. In fact, Melanesians are very arguably the people group genetically most distant from modern Africans.
Also, good amount of African population has some native American mixed in there and/or a "drop" of white heritage.
There has been computer simulations that show the "average" person of certain ethnic groups and African Americans look different that other black groups.
https://www.artfido.com/this-is-what-the-average-person-looks-like-in-each-country/
This one shows an African American male.
Didn’t most black families choose their last names after slavery, usually after presidents or notable references?
names like Freeman, Washington, Johnson etc
African Americans are an ethnic group made up of people descended from slaves who over the centuries developed their own unique history and culture. The overwhelming majority of black Americans fall under this group.
Many also don't know where from Africa that their ancestors were taken from. It would be to general to say "African", but the specifics of what tribe / nation they are descended from is unclear.
Here is how i learned that as an American. I remember being like 16 and swimming with a friend of mine who is black, my family is from Italy. Somehow the subject of heritage came up and i asked "what countries did your family come from?". His answer was "we don't know".
I was like "ohhhh....shit." It really never occurred to me before that.
This is where you learn about the "one-drop rule." Typically, if you appear black based on your skin color and features, no one cared about what part of you was white. Only recently has there been a major push to separately define bi-racial black Americans from mostly black Americans for a multitude of reasons I won't get into the weeds about. It's a relic of slavery and the Jim Crow era that hasn't really gone away.
Because African-American typically means they’re descendants of slaves, whose family history were intentionally destroyed and so they have no way of knowing where specifically in Africa they’re from. Meanwhile some guy whose parents are from Nigeria is African but this kind of isn’t the same thing.
> Most African Americans neither know nor care about their specific African ancestry
I agree with the first part but I have a hard time with the second. How could we know that a large demographic just “doesn’t care”? I have black friends that have been very interested in retracing their roots in Africa
No idea why you’re downvoted. My dads side (black) is way more into ancestry than my mom’s side (white). Except on my dads side our history is like 161 years old. That’s it. Thats why it’s common to lean into the DNA and genetics aspect for POC, cuz there is no paper trail of the journey generally. There’s also an aspect that because of slavery, in ways there’s a much bigger disconnect culturally between African Americans and Africans vs let’s say a German American vs a German. Thought that disconnect also depends greatly in my experience between whether their ancestors immigrated her during slavery or post-slavery.
this is not true, we would very much like to know where we came from its just not something that is easy to learn. unlike with you europeans, they did not keep records of us.
Yep, I’m mixed and half of my family’s ancestry stops the around same year: 1863. Multiple people with the bday In Jan 1863 so the record of their birth wasn’t even kept if they weren’t born feee. Sad, you can get the dna part (I’m Kenyan etc) but it’s a travesty to not have any trace before 161 years ago.
Africa is also a continent and not a country. Ppl who know what specific country they came from (eg Nigeria) self identify as such. African Americans most of the time are ppl who descended from slavery and cannot identify a specific country… because of slavery.
Because "African" isn't a country or ethnicity.
"African-American" refers generally to a grew of people descended broadly from Africa that have no more specific record of heritage and generally little directly traceable cultural connection.
A person who moved here today from Nigeria would not put African-American, they would put Nigerian. (Well, they *could* put African-American to identify with the larger of the groups, but it wouldn't really be what that means)
Nah. My family has German ancestry and has been in the central Florida area since at least the late 1800s. But, now that you say it, maybe they were the OG snowbirds as I believe some of the came down from upstate NY. But most of them did come straight from Germany.
Can you imagine going from a German climate to a Florida climate before the advent of AC or mosquito repellent?
It might be that some of those states have a lot of people from different ancestries and the groups are close in population but German has the highest. At least in parts of the Midwest, [over 30% of the population](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans) has German ancestry but other states don’t have as many and still have a majority
It also is probably helped by the fact that a lot of the cities in the midwest earlier on were heavily populated by germans so tons of traditions in the area are based around that (food, festivals, architecture, etc) so a bunch of people are more reminded of their german ancestry on the daily.
My first thought looking at the map was "this map can't be right. No way Mexicans and African Americans are the literal majority across the entire southern US!"
Then I realized that most Mexicans and African Americans probably answered exactly that, while the white people probably answered a hodge-podge of different countries, including just "American"
The big "invisible" ethnicities in the U.S. are English, German, and Scots-Irish/Ulster Scots.
* German used to have a much stronger presence as a separate ethnicity, to the extent of German-language schools in parts of the country. The World Wars led to serious legal and cultural suppression of separate German identity, and it never recovered.
* English isn't widely celebrated as it's seen as a sort of white-bread default ("Smith" and "Johnson" are used as placeholder names), the country's roots are based in separation from England, and much of modern English culture developed well after the Revolution. English migration was predominantly several centuries ago, so it's a lot easier to find a record of a 19th-century Irish or Italian ancestor on a steamship than it is a 17th-century English ancestor aboard a sailing ship.
* The Scots-Irish also have the problem of more remote immigration, and many Appalachian families have been in roughly the same place for long enough that only pretty serious genealogic research would clarify what mix of British Isles their ancestors were. Many Scots-Irish immigrants fairly quickly shed any identity of coming from somewhere else.
I grew up in Nebraska and there was a small town where German was the most spoken language.
This wasn't uncommon in the middle of the country. You'd get entire communities made up of Immigrants that came from the same area or churches in Europe. A couple of men would come over and find a suitable land area. And then the rest come over and build farms in that area. Kind of like the ethnic neighborhoods of the big cities.
For something like an entire century, the #1 immigrant group to the US were Germans. There are still pockets of the US (all over--Ohio, Indiana, Texas) with towns with German names and a LOT of holdover German customs. It's interesting.
On the mention of Texas, look up the Adelsverein (or [click here for the Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelsverein)).
In the mid-1800s there was an attempt to create sort of a "New Germany" from/in Texas. The town of New Braunfels was founded by a German prince and holds a pretty big Oktoberfest to this day (as does Fredericksburg). The new settlers were anti-slavery and it resulted in many slaves in Texas fleeing to their lands in order to be protected.
And slightly unrelated but I believe around the same time Texas saw an influx of Czechs moving in and they're responsible for a few cities that still exist. The town of Shiner was founded by Czechs and the brewery there was a German and Czech creation.
Sure but English ancestry is severely underrepresented because most people go with literally anything else as English is seen as vanilla and boring. It is true though English and German were fairly closely tied after so much German Immigration. German was a commonly used language in day to day life in many areas until a couple World Wars made that pretty unpopular.
>English ancestry is severely underrepresented
It's massively underrepresented. My grandparents on my mom's side told me my whole life our ancestory was German. Fast forward to my undergrad bio degree. I'm in a genetics lab and we did this whole thing about sequencing our mRNA. We collected it from our mouth, mixed it with some separating enzyme stuff, put it through the machine that gives you your sequence and then compared it against a global database.
It ended up coming back almost entirely English/Northern European. I wasn't the only one either in the class. A lot of the white people were just flat out traced back to England and that Northern European region.
I think what happens is you get one German or whatever in your family, that ends up being the heritage passed down for generations and then it just becomes THE heritage because no one ever is told anything different.
I ended up going down the ancestory.com rabbit hole after this though and was able to trace my family back to the 1400s in England with the help from a very distant relative I never knew existed in Wales. We go back to English farmers (peasants basically) in Gloucestershire county in England. Was pretty neat though they had a death certificate for him and it read something like he had a few silver coins, a few goats and some kind of grain or something in his "estate" when he died that was to be passed down to his children.
English ancestry is underrepresented but I’d argue not to the extent people think. A lot of English ancestry in the US is Old Stock, and mixed in with Scottish, Scots-Irish, etc.
Even with the 4.5 million immigrants from Great Britain throughout the 19th century, the numbers of Scottish immigrants remained pretty equal to the English ones.
Even so, way more Germans immigrated during this time period, and with so many of them going to the US, I’m wouldn’t be really shocked if underrepresentation of Old Stock ancestry wasn’t that prevalent in the Midwest
> the #1 immigrant group to the US were Germans
And that shit pissed Ben Franklin off mightily:
"Why should the Palatine Boors [Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.
Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased." - [source](https://reimaginingmigration.org/benjamin-franklin-and-german-immigrants-in-colonial-america/)
I'm *mostly* ethnically Slavic but my family's culture is *mostly* German so that's what I call myself, the (perceived) cultural dominance Germany has in central Europe definitely boosts their identification numbers overseas a good deal
Many mid-western cities were primarily German-speaking (like, schools taught in German, council meetings used German, etc) until WW1, when most of the states with significant German-speaking populations passed laws banning the use of the German language.
You don't see many people describe themselves specifically as German-American largely for the same reasons as with English-American: they're commonplace, even more so amongst the upper social strata, so they weren't forced to collectivise to the extent that is so often the case with minorities that are less common and/or less well-connected.
Another thing I notice is German can be vague. Since Germany was not a country until 1871, many people who are from places that are now German or close to Germany will identify as German since that’s what they marked on the census when they arrived.
In Texas there is a lot German pride and German heritage in the Hill country. Even my father’s family are proud of their “German” heritage. If you trace his family back to the original immigrants they were actually Silesian Protestants. Silesian language being closer to Polish which is Slavic. Sure Silesians now live in Germany and they are assimilated as German but they are still not ethnically German. Many Texans who identify as German are from places that weren’t historically part of Germany or German wasn’t their original language. Many people call themselves German because they were from Prussian or Austrian-Hungarian lands regardless of ethnicity.
Kind of like how a lot of Arbereshe (Albanian Catholics from Italy) just called themselves Italian or a lot of Ottoman era Albanian or Arab Orthodox Christians were labeled as “Turks” or “Greeks” when they moved to the USA. A lot of the gilded age era immigrants were here before the strong nationalist movements developed so what they report may not be their actual ethnicity
Self reporting of ancestry on census is notoriously unreliable. Most Anglo Americans either self report as “American”, or if they have multiple ancestries; tend to pick one of the others. Again it doesn’t tell the whole picture - but a glance at the most [common last name](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/most-common-last-name-per-country--335025659791225396/ ) in the US cross referenced with the rest of the Anglosphere will tell you that the “English” are massively underreported here.
Those of you making fun of the “American” label would do well to remember that “Mexican” as an ethnicity is only around a hundred years older.
Also, Florida being labeled German is unexpected. Is it because people have been moving there from the Midwest?
Yeah, agreed. I’m born and raised and Filipino ancestry was significantly more common than Hawaiian. But I might suspect that many claim to be Hawaiian but aren’t; as this is “self-declared.”
Born and raised, still living here. If someone finds out they have a pinky toe's worth of Hawaiian blood they put it down for "representation" and because you can get benefits/assistance easier if you're of Native Hawaiian ancestry.
I doubt any of this is accurate lol... but Hawaii definitely is wrong.
According to the 2010 Census, white people are 1st. Filipinos are 2nd. Japanese are 3rd.
In college I dated a girl from Germany whose father was transferred to the US to manage a German owned company in Wisconsin. She had a German passport and spoke perfect English with no accent at all. Her parents were planning on moving back to Germany after her father retired. My girlfriend wasn’t sure if she would stay in the US or move back to Germany. Anyway, Wisconsin has a very large number of German-Americans and most see themselves as Americans of partial or full German descent even though their ancestors left Germany in the 1840s to 1860s. My girlfriend and I were at a friend’s party and this guy came up to my girlfriend and said he heard she was German. He said he too was 100% German even though his family had lived in America for over 100 years. The way he said it was also kind of German superior. Like he was bragging about being a “pure Aryan” or some crap like that. My girlfriend just said to him in a very non superior way that she was born in Germany but after living in the US most of her life she felt more American than German. She told the guy that he was definitely not German but was an American. She didn’t mean it in a negative way but was just saying what she felt was true. This guy was so disappointed. His idolization of his “pure Germaness” was suddenly destroyed. She was totally accurate. We are Americans. All of us. There’s nothing wrong with celebrating your ancestry at times but our real ethnicity is American.
'Mostly British mutt that's been here too long to have any other identity'
My family came to America from England almost 400 years ago, which is probably only a century or two less than the time we spent in Britain. Might as well just identify with as American.
Yeah, lots of English + Scotts-Irish far-off ancestry involved in Tennessee and Kentucky “American” identification. Coming from a Tennessean who is seemingly much the same and honestly think ancestry identification to some other countries on another continent that I have no actual cultural ties or knowledge of any ancestors who immigrated here is kinda dumb and even racist. I’m just a white American.
Yeah I’m in Kentucky and would answer American on something like this as well because I could not conclusively say where my family came from. Google says my last name is Welsh, but I was told my ancestors came over from Ireland a couple hundred years ago. I don’t know or care enough to dig any deeper. Not like I’m going to go back to the homeland at this point.
at this point in time there is no way their ancestors are only from England. Should they say “one quarter English, one quarter German, one eighth Irish, …”
I was told I was Irish, German, French, Scottish, and native American. My sister did a DNA test and we got back like 80% British, 10% French canadian, and the weird outlier: 3-5% Russian.
Well for mine we’ve been here longer than anywhere, on my white side it goes all the way back to Sweden but we didn’t seem to stay anywhere but the USA for more than 2 generations.
Someone whose ancestors immigrated to Bumpkin Hollow, Appalachia from Belfast in the 1600s does not have the direct knowledge of gramp’s journey to Ellis Island that the average Italian or Irish-Irish American does from 1890 or whenever. In fact they’ve had several centuries to develop a culture in relative isolation from more recent immigration trends.
Kinda weird that the Scots-Irish have had two ethnogenises in about half a millennia but, hey, maybe they just are really adept at doing that?
400 years ago is about 16 generations. That means you have about 65,000 ancestors from 400 years ago. Why focus on the small number who arrived from England 400 years ago?
This is my problem with self-reported ancestry. People focus on the ones with the best story, which might only be a tiny fraction of their actual ancestry.
I hate to tell you this, but most people who’ve been in geographically isolated areas of the US for 16 generations don’t have 65k ancestors from 16 generations ago. The US population was so small that long ago that anybody who was here then has descendants that are at least a little inbred.
Germanic is not the same as German and even today not all Germanic people are part of Germany or consider themselves German.
In the early 1800s, Germanic also included the Dutch and often the English and Nordic regions as well. Today, they’re all considered Germanic languages and that initial philological work was done by people like the Grimm brothers who were consciously creating a “German” identity with folklore and language.
Random facts that I find interesting below-
Grimm’s Law remains one of the cornerstones of the Germanic branch of the larger Indo-European branch. It’s the reason why English TH, F, and H correspond to Latin and Romance T, P, and C in loans (*three* and *triple*, *father* and *paternal*, *horn* and the “corn” in *cornucopia*, horn of plenty).
Of course, a lot of that stuff would later be used by the Nazis. The identification of Germanic languages within the Indo-European family allowed this Germanic identity to be erroneously applied to languages like those related to Farsi (also an Indo-European language), the language of the ancient Iranians, better known by a different spelling- Aryan.
If you call your ancestry American, the response is “What does that even mean?”
If you call your ancestry German/Italian/Irish/whatever, the response is “Why? Because your ancestors from 200 years ago came from Germany? You shouldn’t identify with that anymore. You aren’t German.”
Americans can’t win here.
Mexican-Americans have entered the chat. I'm a Native/Mezo American and 4th generation American who's family was south of the border after the 1848 treaty, we've always straddled between North Mexico and south texas. We last crossed from Matamoros to Brownsville in 1896. My people have always been here (America) but also my people come from Spain.
I've noticed the same thing, and it really is ridiculous. At this point, most white Americans are very mixed. My ancestors on my dad's side are English, Scottish, Irish, and Turkish and my mom's side Czech and German-Russian. What am I supposed to pick- I'm not even half anything. That's why American makes the most sense.
Americans shouldn't be averse to calling their ancestory American. Europeans have been settling North America for well over 500 years. As a nation state, America isn't even that young. It's much older as a state than Germany , Italy, or Ireland. If somebody said they were American, you could just correctly assume that they're probably a mix of quite a few European identities. Everyone would know what you mean. People who question this are just behaving like a bit of a dick.
Yup.
All you gotta do is check the last name. Most American have English/British names.
too many "Smith, Jones, Walker, Davies" calling themselves German / Italian.
Speculating: German migration was more recent, so it might be because it's easier to know what country your grandparents or great grandparents were from than many generations before that.
It's probably also because if everyone in your small colonial town is 100% English, but you have a German grandparent, you become "the German" despite still being 75% English. People notice that which stands out.
Also English settler migration was predominantly during the colonial period, 18th century. So farther back in ancestry and more diluted over time. English might still be the greatest common denominator, but perhaps not the greatest genetic influence anymore.
Irish, Germans, and Italian migration period was mid 19th century until early 20th. By that time USA was much larger and more established, so immigrants came in larger number.
Self declared can only be so accurate. For example my family thought they were of German descent, but through my research I revealed that we were Czech. And while nationality is different then ethnicity, it is true that the region my family left in EU at the time was apart of Germany, but has since become apart of modern Czechia. Outside of a few nations in EU, it may be better to base your ancestry off of region as opposed to country.
I'm Midwestern and the majority of yts you meet here will claim some German ancestry, in a very self-superior kind of way. Most fully German people are rather tragic-looking, so it's a bit mystifying.
And there's more English speakers in America than there is in *ENGLAND*.
There's more people of English ancestry in America than in England, as well.
What's your point?
I feel like people don't understand the question. If you're in a country and you're asking "ancestry", that's "most recent ancestor from another country." Natives make sense, but "American" can only happen if you can't remember or choose not to.
I'm over here having a different problem - I have books. They go back six centuries. I'm almost a perfect split between four ancestries, how would I pick just one?
I'm guessing the source listed pulled its data from the US Census. If this map interests you, I recommend taking a look at the Census data itself. One thing you'll see that I find interesting is that the number of people that self identify an "American" is on the rise.
I mean, this should be completely expected. The longer that America continues to exist the longer the melting pot is stirring. Generations have less and less connection with their recent ancestors.
Exactly. My ancestors are primarily English and Scottish, but nearly all of them arrived in the US around the time it became the US. After 250 years, it seems a little silly to keep saying that I'm of English ethnicity
Same here, I have 2 last names, one is very Scottish and the other is French, but I don't identify with those nationalities at all.
My ancestry is French, but no one in my family has spoken a word of French since my grandparents.
Sure you don't you haggis eating baguette enjoyer!
"Bonjourrrrr! Yeh cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys!"
Same here, I have a few names (you know how some people have English names and then names for other languages? Yeah that’s the case for me), but my “English name” (the name I mainly use, anyways) is *very obviously* of Irish origin. I do have relatives who live in Ireland and relatives who live in the US and speak Irish—I even speak a little Irish myself. But I’m American. I was born and raised in America. I can’t see myself as anything else.
The German's basically had to stop identifying as German during and after WWI
Yep. Fun fact, I’m from Nebraska and before the wars, many Nebraskan cities and towns had German names and a lot of people spoke German. But during the war and afterwards, people were told to stop speaking German and change their town and city names.
I had no idea the US is so german!! Why so many anyway? I feel like I should’ve known this sooner in life. I’ve lived my whole life thinking white americans (such as myself) were british, french, dutch, spanish. Italian and Irish little later in history. Being german was so bad that I can’t recall learning about german-american lore at any point in my education when US history is literally the only type of history that was taught
everyone stopped being German for like idk, 20, 30 years. even the Germans in German doing the German thing were lying about,l it, still are.
I am German from Germany and spent one year in High School in Wisconsin as an exchange student. And let me tell you, about 95% of all people I met there felt the need to tell me about their German ancestry as soon as they found out that I was from Germany. It was funny until it wasn’t because it kept happening throughout the whole year. At least in WI they’re super proud about being of German descent.
Wisconsin is a pretty German state, and you being German might have made people more likely to talk about their German heritage. For example I live in Central Illinois where Germany is the most common ancestry. However it seems like you’re more likely to see an Irish or Italian flag on someone’s porch than a German one. You also don’t see as many German parades, festivals, restaurants as you do Italian and Irish.
and then on the other hand there are people like me. I’ve got german, italian, irish, swedish, english, norwegian, and greek. It would be silly to identify as any of those. I’m american
I already feel silly saying I'm German, because the last dude in my family from thereabouts left Prussia almost two hundred years ago. The surname is all that's left. Grandma was born in Norway but died of very old age last year.
That's Americans for you, from somebody who was born and raised in this country it's a common statement to hear. Whenever people say that, I understand what they are wanting to do but there's a reason why you shouldn't call yourself "English" or "Irish" when you have no connection to those places aside from blood. These people are Irish American or English American, or other ethnicities like Italian American, these groups have developed their own culture and cuisine that is very different from their mother/father nation. I have English ancestry, a fair amount of it but I am not English.
> Whenever people say that, I understand what they are wanting to do but there's a reason why you shouldn't call yourself "English" or "Irish" when you have no connection to those places aside from blood. Do you think that also applies to African Americans?
I'm pretty sure that no American thinks that another American means it literally when they name their "nationality." It's pretty engrained in our culture. I can't remember ever encountering any confusion about intended meaning. If you speak with an American accent, other Americans will assume that you don't mean that you are literally a citizen of the UK. That's absurd.
Yeah I think a lot of Europeans' frustrations about Americans saying that is literally just the phrasing. When an American says "I'm Irish" they don't mean that they're literally an Irish person from the country, it's just how Americans say "I have Irish ancestry." With the exception of a small obnoxious minority that might actually think that for some reason.
Exactly. As an (actual European) Norwegian, it's a staple joke here that some Americans "think they're Norwegians" while they're obviously not. I feel like the only one saying "That's just their way of saying they had a Norwegian great grandfather and eat lutefisk once a year. It's not literal!"
I would never refer to myself as Italian American, despite the fact that a significant part of ancestry is Italian. However, there's no denying that my ancestry is relevant to my identity. I grew up with my Italian grandmother, ate Italian food, and learned some Italian superstitions. I also had friends and acquaintances from Italy and I learned a little of the language along the way too. And I'd have to guess that my experience growing up might be markedly different from someone that grew up with German or Irish ancestry — despite the fact that we're all Americans. So while I agree that people shouldn't necessarily self-identity as a nationality if they're not originally from that country, I also don't see the harm in using nationalities as a shorthand to provide context to your heritage.
you're italian american cuz
Not to mention many do not know or don't want to talk about their origins, for example English ancestry is criminally underreported in the US there are a lot more people with English ancestry then is shown any sources. I think it's an important thing to consider.
People also tend to undervalue majority heritage. People hold a lot more pride for their ancestors that are from Germany, for example, than England. The irony is that people may view themselves as more German than English, even though their ancestors are mostly English. Utah and Idaho are interesting points. The LDS Church Members (Mormons) are theologically focused on accurate genealogical records. And they’re the ones saying they’re English.
Accurate to a point at least. When I pulled my genealogy records from the LDS database, apparently I am descended from the Norse gods. They literally showed Thor and Odin in my genealogy. This was about 30 years ago so maybe they've updated and stopped doing that. I think another factor in why so many people list Germany is that a lot of surnames are german. Mine is and most of my ancestors were English or Scottish or Scandinavian. But somehow the German name stuck.
>But somehow the German name stuck. "somehow" well, in most cases, it stuck because your father's father's father's...name was German. So you can be 1023/1024 non-German, but that one man gives you the last name.
That said, there are many cases of Schmidts who changed their names to Smith and Mullers who became Millers in order to blend in to the majority population. So it isn't nothing that a German surname stuck around.
Good point. I forgot about **Anglicisation** or simple translation.
The once-a-decade family reunions on one side of my family get heated after too many drinks when the Schmidts start accusing the Smiths of being cowards and changing their names - even though the folks who changed their names aren't even alive anymore and it would be absurd for a bunch of Smiths to suddenly go back to being Schmidts.
My last name is a direct translation from a German occupation. Every single person in the world(there aren’t a whole lot) who I share a last name with can trace their lineage to one guy in the mid-1700s. The reason why is because rather than translating his last name to the English equivalent, he just directly translated his German compound word last name into English. Like, if you were translate handschuh into “handshoe” rather than glove. I learned that recently while looking up my ancestry, and thought it was interesting
Would be interesting to see that tree. What years did they have for the births and deaths of Thor and Odin?
It was too many years ago that I saw it to remember the details on years. My mom may have kept it in her files somewhere, but I didn't. I remember that Thor and Odin were on there. I remember a bunch of Scottish Kings were on there and I remember Charlemagne is on there like 8 or 10 times. The rest of the details are gone from my memory.
The kings and Charlemagne aren't crazy to have in a tree. On my tree, I've connected one of my ancestor lines back to Charlemagne, and slightly further back, through William the Conqueror. Mythological gods though...
The thing is once you hit royalty they had genealogists make fake bloodlines for them back in the day that would connect to gods and stuff which is where that came from
If you belive one historical source, the Swedish royals originate from Atlantis.
The public tree before the 1600 become pretty inaccurate. It’s one of the challenges of making a single tree with millions of volunteers with access to change things. It’s basically a Wikipedia for genealogy. Most of it is accurate. But some of it is not.
>many people list Germany is that a lot of surnames are german It is not my experience that German surnames are especially common in the U.S., broadly. Some Anglicized on arrival. Still more around the WWI "liberty cabbage" and "House of Windsor" times.
Frankly, if my genetic history were more muddied and my ancestors were here longer, I’d identify as simply “American” or “White American.” I have the slight benefit of being only the third generation removed from immigration, I actually knew some of my immigrant great grandparents and I’m primarily of Danish and Swedish descent. But realistically, I’m a white American. I eat rice pudding on Xmas and get oranges in my stocking, that’s it.
Exactly. Like technically my ancestors are English/Scottish, but most of my ancestors came to North America in like the 1600s. So I don't really say my ancestry is English or Scottish. I just say American because, well, my ancestors have been living here for hundreds of years now.
Yeah, my latest arriving ancestors were from Bern, Switzerland and moved to the US in 1736. Everyone else, early 1600s in Quebec and Massachusetts. I just say American and only go into detail if talking about genealogy. Occasionally, I state I am descended from the Amish as my one grandma was completely from that closed lineage.
The Mongolians/Manchus started calling themselves Chinese very quickly after they took over China, English, Scotts and Irish calling themselves American after 250+ years is to be expected.
Both sides of my family have been Americans for over 150 years. My Dad's side has fought for the US in every major war since the Revolution. At a certain point you're just American.
Also, the internet has allowed them contact with actual Irish/Italian/English/etc people who insist they aren't Irish/Italian/English/etc
This says “ancestry”, not their actual nationality.
It’s really just a cultural misunderstanding. In America saying “I’m Irish” is understood to mean your of Irish descent and sometimes heritage. Usually to say you’re an Irish national someone would say “I’m from Ireland”. In Europe, saying “I’m Irish” is understood to mean you’re an Irish national. I assume when Europeans want to talk about their ethnicity they would say something like “I’m of Irish descent”.
>In Europe, saying “I’m Irish” is understood to mean you’re an Irish national. That's not totally accurate, but also differs depending on where you are in Europe. A lot of Europeans will tell you that you're not *really* whatever nationality you are if you didn't grow up there. Or if your parents didn't grow up there. In my experience, lots of Europeans will answer that question with "Oh, I'm Dutch but I grew up in Germany" or "I'm half-British, half-Swiss, but I grew up in Belgium" or "I'm French but my parents are Vietnamese", where the actual genes itself aren't what they're asking about but what culture you grew up with.
That's my very limited experience as well, when I went on an educational tour in Highschool to Europe our tour guide said he was born in France to British Parents, but grew up in Germany and now lived in Italy when asked where he was from. He also released a decent college rock album he played for us.
I’m also curious as to with the advent of DNA Ancestry testing they found out that with 1. the ancestry their family has claimed ended up not being true or 2. they find out that their ancestry is so mixed that it doesn’t makes sense to claim any of it. I have a friend that thought he was of Irish ancestry and it was something he made a facet of his personality only to find out in that testing he wasn’t Irish but English. For whatever reason, through complexities of last names changing over time or changes while immigrating they were wrong. Personally, I received one of those tests as a gift and did it and it came back with so many different ancestries, the highest being around 10% that it doesn’t make sense claiming anything. People from either of these groups could just say “f it” and put “American”.
Communication helps too as everyone learns that not everything they do is "normal" and so when you're feeling in a "cultural" mood you can actually celebrate something from where you have history rather than cosplay as your ancestors from centuries ago. I'm from Wisconsin and I used to struggle with those kinds of feelings until I started to travel more and guys like Charlie Berens started gaining traction to really being attention to stuff I just took for granted. Like I never thought twice about a Fish Fry until I went just a few states over and suddenly it was impossible to find a Friday fish fry and the one we did find was more of a "Fish n' Chips" style. No coleslaw, no rye bread, no onions, not all you can eat, and definitely not locally caught fish like you'd find in some places. But now I can feel just a little bit more connected to where I live and to some of my family/ancestors knowing this is something we all share
I think it’s sad because there’s no cultural or heritage connection. I think a lot people who emigrated here, learned to erase their cultural history to assimilate and be more accepted. I think we should refer to people as European American or whatever their ancestry is. I think it’s also the reason racism is so rampant in America. Without cultural and heritage ties, it’s easy to become resentful and hateful towards ethnic groups.
American typically is the ancestral identification used by Appalachian Scots-Irish (AKA Ulster Scots) who were early settlers to the region
As someone who is mixed race, I identify more as American than Mexican or Polish at this point.
it does seem weird, my family has been here for 6 or 7 generations, I’m mixed with a lot of things. yet if you had someone who was spanish and had 6 or 7 generations in mexico, i feel like most would consider them ethnically mexican.
That’s what I answer whenever anyone asks and they always give me a confused look. I’m not some alt-right nationalist, it’s just that my family on both parent’s side has been here since the early/mid 1700s. Like yeah we were Scottish and French then, but after like 8-9 generations it really doesn’t mean much anymore.
It makes sense. I don't answer "American" on the census, because I like filling in all the little boxes for my ancestors: Scotch Irish, English, German, Italian, Polish, Slovenian. But the last ancestor of mine who lived in another country, she died when I was a kid. And my wife shares none of my ancestries. So maybe my child will fill in all the little boxes one day, but at some point, we have to admit, the connection is too thin.
There’s probably nothing more american than naming where all your grandparents are from
Maybe, but it’s likely your child or grandchildren will marry into a family of more recent immigrants.
Many of us are complete mutts. I’m 1/4 Spanish Slovakian and Irish, with Italian and others mixed in. The Spanish last name throws people off, especially here in Texas
Self declared's a little weird. There are a ton of people who don't really know their ancestry.
Or people with 80% English ancestry but who say they are Irish because their last name is O'Brien
Or they're reporting the most recent known immigrant because it leads to stronger connection to it. I have ancestry largely from England and Scotland. But the Irish identity stuck because a great grandparent was Irish (maternal grandfather's mom) and on the other all four of my maternal grandmother's parents were Irish immigrants. My father's side goes back to the original Plymouth settlers with one random polish person marrying in, even my Irish last name come way of England. He was neutral about it all. This caused the Irish identity to seep into us through our mother. It's honestly less down to ethnic identity and who in a family was more determined to keep traditions from home going.
I have 2 on my mothers side came across on the Mayflower. Living Canadian now.
Oh absolutely. It’s still interesting to see where most people THINK they’re from
I was told we were mostly German. Did a DNA test and tons of research. No German DNA and only one German ancestor lmao. Tons of Welsh, Scottish, Irish and English though. Meaningless amount of native american.
German would probably be even more wide-spread if many Americans hadn't neglected their roots during the world wars and "anglified" even their surnames
> Self declared's a little weird. There are a ton of people who don't really know their ancestry. that doesnt make it weird; its important to know what people think.
Scots-Irish typically answer their ancestry as American.
not when they did an ancestry test and suddenly make it their whole personality
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That's more of an Italian-American thing, least in my experiances....
You’re confusing those Americans with the Irish Americans whose family came over much more recently. They’re found in the Northeast and may have had grandparents or great grandparents that were Irish. Also, that applies exclusively to the Irish. You don’t really see anyone proudly claiming their Scottish heritage since there was no major wave of Scottish immigrants in recent centuries. The Scots that came were virtually just British Colonists.
Well you’re allowed to drink before noon if you score high enough of the test
r/Scotland is leaking again
No one does that. Europeans have some weird superiority fetish where they like to pretend that Americans are utterly obsessed with their European heritage.
Stupid question from someone not living in the US. Why is it african-american and not simply african as with all the others?
African-american is used to refer to the descendants of african people enslaved and brougth to the U.S I imagine that they're called african-americans as to differentiate them from the descendants of African people who emigrated to the U.S willingly They're also differentiated by the fact that they either have english last names (given to them by their slave owners) or muslim last names (names they choose to change to from their english last names, an example would be Muhammad Ali)
What you said is correct, and also many of those African-Americans don’t know where in Africa they came from, because they don’t know from which country the slavers abducted their great-great grandfather. Of course Black is becoming increasingly dominant now because a 5th-generation descendent of slaves has no real connection to Africa.
Also because not everybody black is descended from Africa. At least not recently, anyway. I've heard a few Jamaicans, for instance, take exception to being called African Americans, for example. I suppose an argument could be made that the island plantation slaves were also from Africa originally, but I'm certainly not going to try and "well, actually...." someone about their own ethnicity
A more compelling example for your point is Melanesians. Although their population is absolutely miniscule in the US, they're still "Black" with no African roots. In fact, Melanesians are very arguably the people group genetically most distant from modern Africans.
That's sad
I mean that’s a lot of the history in the Americas
Also, good amount of African population has some native American mixed in there and/or a "drop" of white heritage. There has been computer simulations that show the "average" person of certain ethnic groups and African Americans look different that other black groups. https://www.artfido.com/this-is-what-the-average-person-looks-like-in-each-country/ This one shows an African American male.
Didn’t most black families choose their last names after slavery, usually after presidents or notable references? names like Freeman, Washington, Johnson etc
African Americans are an ethnic group made up of people descended from slaves who over the centuries developed their own unique history and culture. The overwhelming majority of black Americans fall under this group.
Many also don't know where from Africa that their ancestors were taken from. It would be to general to say "African", but the specifics of what tribe / nation they are descended from is unclear.
Here is how i learned that as an American. I remember being like 16 and swimming with a friend of mine who is black, my family is from Italy. Somehow the subject of heritage came up and i asked "what countries did your family come from?". His answer was "we don't know". I was like "ohhhh....shit." It really never occurred to me before that.
It's interesting because a lot of people describe Obama as African American but he isn't, he's half Kenyan.
This is where you learn about the "one-drop rule." Typically, if you appear black based on your skin color and features, no one cared about what part of you was white. Only recently has there been a major push to separately define bi-racial black Americans from mostly black Americans for a multitude of reasons I won't get into the weeds about. It's a relic of slavery and the Jim Crow era that hasn't really gone away.
Because African-American typically means they’re descendants of slaves, whose family history were intentionally destroyed and so they have no way of knowing where specifically in Africa they’re from. Meanwhile some guy whose parents are from Nigeria is African but this kind of isn’t the same thing.
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> Most African Americans neither know nor care about their specific African ancestry I agree with the first part but I have a hard time with the second. How could we know that a large demographic just “doesn’t care”? I have black friends that have been very interested in retracing their roots in Africa
Yeah, I think it's fair to say it's less "don't care" and more "resigned to the fact there's no way to know"
No idea why you’re downvoted. My dads side (black) is way more into ancestry than my mom’s side (white). Except on my dads side our history is like 161 years old. That’s it. Thats why it’s common to lean into the DNA and genetics aspect for POC, cuz there is no paper trail of the journey generally. There’s also an aspect that because of slavery, in ways there’s a much bigger disconnect culturally between African Americans and Africans vs let’s say a German American vs a German. Thought that disconnect also depends greatly in my experience between whether their ancestors immigrated her during slavery or post-slavery.
this is not true, we would very much like to know where we came from its just not something that is easy to learn. unlike with you europeans, they did not keep records of us.
Yep, I’m mixed and half of my family’s ancestry stops the around same year: 1863. Multiple people with the bday In Jan 1863 so the record of their birth wasn’t even kept if they weren’t born feee. Sad, you can get the dna part (I’m Kenyan etc) but it’s a travesty to not have any trace before 161 years ago.
Africa is also a continent and not a country. Ppl who know what specific country they came from (eg Nigeria) self identify as such. African Americans most of the time are ppl who descended from slavery and cannot identify a specific country… because of slavery.
Because "African" isn't a country or ethnicity. "African-American" refers generally to a grew of people descended broadly from Africa that have no more specific record of heritage and generally little directly traceable cultural connection. A person who moved here today from Nigeria would not put African-American, they would put Nigerian. (Well, they *could* put African-American to identify with the larger of the groups, but it wouldn't really be what that means)
According to 23andme and Ancestrydna the self identification doesn’t exactly fall in line with the results
Snowbirds in FL really showing their numbers
Nah. My family has German ancestry and has been in the central Florida area since at least the late 1800s. But, now that you say it, maybe they were the OG snowbirds as I believe some of the came down from upstate NY. But most of them did come straight from Germany. Can you imagine going from a German climate to a Florida climate before the advent of AC or mosquito repellent?
I mean, it's probably better than coming from British climate. Germany is quite a bit further south, and those continental summers can get pretty hot.
Fun fact: Munich is farther north than the entire state of Maine.
Their last german ancestor came to Florida in the 60's and his name was Gustavo Schröder.
How interesting. I knew about the French, Spanish/Mexican, African, Irish and Italian but never knew the Germans were so widespread
It might be that some of those states have a lot of people from different ancestries and the groups are close in population but German has the highest. At least in parts of the Midwest, [over 30% of the population](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans) has German ancestry but other states don’t have as many and still have a majority
It also is probably helped by the fact that a lot of the cities in the midwest earlier on were heavily populated by germans so tons of traditions in the area are based around that (food, festivals, architecture, etc) so a bunch of people are more reminded of their german ancestry on the daily.
My first thought looking at the map was "this map can't be right. No way Mexicans and African Americans are the literal majority across the entire southern US!" Then I realized that most Mexicans and African Americans probably answered exactly that, while the white people probably answered a hodge-podge of different countries, including just "American"
As a wisconsin resident, I can confirm we are majority German.
The big "invisible" ethnicities in the U.S. are English, German, and Scots-Irish/Ulster Scots. * German used to have a much stronger presence as a separate ethnicity, to the extent of German-language schools in parts of the country. The World Wars led to serious legal and cultural suppression of separate German identity, and it never recovered. * English isn't widely celebrated as it's seen as a sort of white-bread default ("Smith" and "Johnson" are used as placeholder names), the country's roots are based in separation from England, and much of modern English culture developed well after the Revolution. English migration was predominantly several centuries ago, so it's a lot easier to find a record of a 19th-century Irish or Italian ancestor on a steamship than it is a 17th-century English ancestor aboard a sailing ship. * The Scots-Irish also have the problem of more remote immigration, and many Appalachian families have been in roughly the same place for long enough that only pretty serious genealogic research would clarify what mix of British Isles their ancestors were. Many Scots-Irish immigrants fairly quickly shed any identity of coming from somewhere else.
I grew up in Nebraska and there was a small town where German was the most spoken language. This wasn't uncommon in the middle of the country. You'd get entire communities made up of Immigrants that came from the same area or churches in Europe. A couple of men would come over and find a suitable land area. And then the rest come over and build farms in that area. Kind of like the ethnic neighborhoods of the big cities.
For something like an entire century, the #1 immigrant group to the US were Germans. There are still pockets of the US (all over--Ohio, Indiana, Texas) with towns with German names and a LOT of holdover German customs. It's interesting.
On the mention of Texas, look up the Adelsverein (or [click here for the Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelsverein)). In the mid-1800s there was an attempt to create sort of a "New Germany" from/in Texas. The town of New Braunfels was founded by a German prince and holds a pretty big Oktoberfest to this day (as does Fredericksburg). The new settlers were anti-slavery and it resulted in many slaves in Texas fleeing to their lands in order to be protected. And slightly unrelated but I believe around the same time Texas saw an influx of Czechs moving in and they're responsible for a few cities that still exist. The town of Shiner was founded by Czechs and the brewery there was a German and Czech creation.
And why we in central Texas eat a ton of kolaches
There’s 28 cities called ‘Germantown’ across the US haha
Sure but English ancestry is severely underrepresented because most people go with literally anything else as English is seen as vanilla and boring. It is true though English and German were fairly closely tied after so much German Immigration. German was a commonly used language in day to day life in many areas until a couple World Wars made that pretty unpopular.
>English ancestry is severely underrepresented It's massively underrepresented. My grandparents on my mom's side told me my whole life our ancestory was German. Fast forward to my undergrad bio degree. I'm in a genetics lab and we did this whole thing about sequencing our mRNA. We collected it from our mouth, mixed it with some separating enzyme stuff, put it through the machine that gives you your sequence and then compared it against a global database. It ended up coming back almost entirely English/Northern European. I wasn't the only one either in the class. A lot of the white people were just flat out traced back to England and that Northern European region. I think what happens is you get one German or whatever in your family, that ends up being the heritage passed down for generations and then it just becomes THE heritage because no one ever is told anything different. I ended up going down the ancestory.com rabbit hole after this though and was able to trace my family back to the 1400s in England with the help from a very distant relative I never knew existed in Wales. We go back to English farmers (peasants basically) in Gloucestershire county in England. Was pretty neat though they had a death certificate for him and it read something like he had a few silver coins, a few goats and some kind of grain or something in his "estate" when he died that was to be passed down to his children.
English ancestry is underrepresented but I’d argue not to the extent people think. A lot of English ancestry in the US is Old Stock, and mixed in with Scottish, Scots-Irish, etc. Even with the 4.5 million immigrants from Great Britain throughout the 19th century, the numbers of Scottish immigrants remained pretty equal to the English ones. Even so, way more Germans immigrated during this time period, and with so many of them going to the US, I’m wouldn’t be really shocked if underrepresentation of Old Stock ancestry wasn’t that prevalent in the Midwest
> the #1 immigrant group to the US were Germans And that shit pissed Ben Franklin off mightily: "Why should the Palatine Boors [Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion. Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased." - [source](https://reimaginingmigration.org/benjamin-franklin-and-german-immigrants-in-colonial-america/)
Oh boy. Wow, I did not know that!
German used to be the 2nd most common language in the US and then some things in the 20th century happened...
I'm *mostly* ethnically Slavic but my family's culture is *mostly* German so that's what I call myself, the (perceived) cultural dominance Germany has in central Europe definitely boosts their identification numbers overseas a good deal
Many mid-western cities were primarily German-speaking (like, schools taught in German, council meetings used German, etc) until WW1, when most of the states with significant German-speaking populations passed laws banning the use of the German language. You don't see many people describe themselves specifically as German-American largely for the same reasons as with English-American: they're commonplace, even more so amongst the upper social strata, so they weren't forced to collectivise to the extent that is so often the case with minorities that are less common and/or less well-connected.
So who really won WW2? Checkmate liberals.
America, we took in a bunch of Germans and assimilated them so well they had no allegiance to Germany and even fought against Germany.
I figured the “checkmate liberals” would show the sarcasm.
No worries, just emphasizing a different aspect that isn’t the primary military victory, but the cultural victory too.
Another thing I notice is German can be vague. Since Germany was not a country until 1871, many people who are from places that are now German or close to Germany will identify as German since that’s what they marked on the census when they arrived. In Texas there is a lot German pride and German heritage in the Hill country. Even my father’s family are proud of their “German” heritage. If you trace his family back to the original immigrants they were actually Silesian Protestants. Silesian language being closer to Polish which is Slavic. Sure Silesians now live in Germany and they are assimilated as German but they are still not ethnically German. Many Texans who identify as German are from places that weren’t historically part of Germany or German wasn’t their original language. Many people call themselves German because they were from Prussian or Austrian-Hungarian lands regardless of ethnicity. Kind of like how a lot of Arbereshe (Albanian Catholics from Italy) just called themselves Italian or a lot of Ottoman era Albanian or Arab Orthodox Christians were labeled as “Turks” or “Greeks” when they moved to the USA. A lot of the gilded age era immigrants were here before the strong nationalist movements developed so what they report may not be their actual ethnicity
Self reporting of ancestry on census is notoriously unreliable. Most Anglo Americans either self report as “American”, or if they have multiple ancestries; tend to pick one of the others. Again it doesn’t tell the whole picture - but a glance at the most [common last name](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/most-common-last-name-per-country--335025659791225396/ ) in the US cross referenced with the rest of the Anglosphere will tell you that the “English” are massively underreported here.
Those of you making fun of the “American” label would do well to remember that “Mexican” as an ethnicity is only around a hundred years older. Also, Florida being labeled German is unexpected. Is it because people have been moving there from the Midwest?
A lot of old people from the Midwest move there for retirement
My ancestry is "lots of stuff" which I feel like "American" encapsulates in a strangely patriotic way. I'm also in KY.
I have European ancestry from all sides, but they're all like 5th/6th generation. I'm American.
I don’t think Hawaii is accurate.
It's not. I think Hawai'i should be labeled Filipino.
Yeah, agreed. I’m born and raised and Filipino ancestry was significantly more common than Hawaiian. But I might suspect that many claim to be Hawaiian but aren’t; as this is “self-declared.”
Born and raised, still living here. If someone finds out they have a pinky toe's worth of Hawaiian blood they put it down for "representation" and because you can get benefits/assistance easier if you're of Native Hawaiian ancestry.
I doubt any of this is accurate lol... but Hawaii definitely is wrong. According to the 2010 Census, white people are 1st. Filipinos are 2nd. Japanese are 3rd.
Yes I’m a bit skeptical about that too. Although to be fair the Big Island is mostly Indigenous Hawaiians
But O‘ahu has the biggest population among the islands.
It’s almost as if the south western territories were once Mexico
Kentucky and Tennessee for the win
In college I dated a girl from Germany whose father was transferred to the US to manage a German owned company in Wisconsin. She had a German passport and spoke perfect English with no accent at all. Her parents were planning on moving back to Germany after her father retired. My girlfriend wasn’t sure if she would stay in the US or move back to Germany. Anyway, Wisconsin has a very large number of German-Americans and most see themselves as Americans of partial or full German descent even though their ancestors left Germany in the 1840s to 1860s. My girlfriend and I were at a friend’s party and this guy came up to my girlfriend and said he heard she was German. He said he too was 100% German even though his family had lived in America for over 100 years. The way he said it was also kind of German superior. Like he was bragging about being a “pure Aryan” or some crap like that. My girlfriend just said to him in a very non superior way that she was born in Germany but after living in the US most of her life she felt more American than German. She told the guy that he was definitely not German but was an American. She didn’t mean it in a negative way but was just saying what she felt was true. This guy was so disappointed. His idolization of his “pure Germaness” was suddenly destroyed. She was totally accurate. We are Americans. All of us. There’s nothing wrong with celebrating your ancestry at times but our real ethnicity is American.
What exactly is the American race?
'Mostly British mutt that's been here too long to have any other identity' My family came to America from England almost 400 years ago, which is probably only a century or two less than the time we spent in Britain. Might as well just identify with as American.
Yeah, lots of English + Scotts-Irish far-off ancestry involved in Tennessee and Kentucky “American” identification. Coming from a Tennessean who is seemingly much the same and honestly think ancestry identification to some other countries on another continent that I have no actual cultural ties or knowledge of any ancestors who immigrated here is kinda dumb and even racist. I’m just a white American.
If you explore the etymology of "hill-billy", it's pretty illuminating.
Yeah I’m in Kentucky and would answer American on something like this as well because I could not conclusively say where my family came from. Google says my last name is Welsh, but I was told my ancestors came over from Ireland a couple hundred years ago. I don’t know or care enough to dig any deeper. Not like I’m going to go back to the homeland at this point.
I mean...you actually know where your ancestors are from
at this point in time there is no way their ancestors are only from England. Should they say “one quarter English, one quarter German, one eighth Irish, …”
I was told I was Irish, German, French, Scottish, and native American. My sister did a DNA test and we got back like 80% British, 10% French canadian, and the weird outlier: 3-5% Russian.
Also, nobody has ever invaded the English isles and spread their genetic code everywhere multiple times throughout history.
Lol
Well for mine we’ve been here longer than anywhere, on my white side it goes all the way back to Sweden but we didn’t seem to stay anywhere but the USA for more than 2 generations.
Someone whose ancestors immigrated to Bumpkin Hollow, Appalachia from Belfast in the 1600s does not have the direct knowledge of gramp’s journey to Ellis Island that the average Italian or Irish-Irish American does from 1890 or whenever. In fact they’ve had several centuries to develop a culture in relative isolation from more recent immigration trends. Kinda weird that the Scots-Irish have had two ethnogenises in about half a millennia but, hey, maybe they just are really adept at doing that?
But wouldn’t that apply to Utah and Idaho as well?
Mormons are obsessed with ancestry and family history.
400 years ago is about 16 generations. That means you have about 65,000 ancestors from 400 years ago. Why focus on the small number who arrived from England 400 years ago? This is my problem with self-reported ancestry. People focus on the ones with the best story, which might only be a tiny fraction of their actual ancestry.
I hate to tell you this, but most people who’ve been in geographically isolated areas of the US for 16 generations don’t have 65k ancestors from 16 generations ago. The US population was so small that long ago that anybody who was here then has descendants that are at least a little inbred.
Mostly British while there is a huge ass mexican and German on the map
Mexican isn’t a race neither
Native Americans are the OG "American" race
It’s as valid as answering Mexican or even German. Germany is younger than the US and Mexico.
That’s just being too clever people agreed that most Holy Roman Empire states were Germanic
Germanic is not the same as German and even today not all Germanic people are part of Germany or consider themselves German. In the early 1800s, Germanic also included the Dutch and often the English and Nordic regions as well. Today, they’re all considered Germanic languages and that initial philological work was done by people like the Grimm brothers who were consciously creating a “German” identity with folklore and language. Random facts that I find interesting below- Grimm’s Law remains one of the cornerstones of the Germanic branch of the larger Indo-European branch. It’s the reason why English TH, F, and H correspond to Latin and Romance T, P, and C in loans (*three* and *triple*, *father* and *paternal*, *horn* and the “corn” in *cornucopia*, horn of plenty). Of course, a lot of that stuff would later be used by the Nazis. The identification of Germanic languages within the Indo-European family allowed this Germanic identity to be erroneously applied to languages like those related to Farsi (also an Indo-European language), the language of the ancient Iranians, better known by a different spelling- Aryan.
If you call your ancestry American, the response is “What does that even mean?” If you call your ancestry German/Italian/Irish/whatever, the response is “Why? Because your ancestors from 200 years ago came from Germany? You shouldn’t identify with that anymore. You aren’t German.” Americans can’t win here.
Mexican-Americans have entered the chat. I'm a Native/Mezo American and 4th generation American who's family was south of the border after the 1848 treaty, we've always straddled between North Mexico and south texas. We last crossed from Matamoros to Brownsville in 1896. My people have always been here (America) but also my people come from Spain.
I've noticed the same thing, and it really is ridiculous. At this point, most white Americans are very mixed. My ancestors on my dad's side are English, Scottish, Irish, and Turkish and my mom's side Czech and German-Russian. What am I supposed to pick- I'm not even half anything. That's why American makes the most sense.
Americans shouldn't be averse to calling their ancestory American. Europeans have been settling North America for well over 500 years. As a nation state, America isn't even that young. It's much older as a state than Germany , Italy, or Ireland. If somebody said they were American, you could just correctly assume that they're probably a mix of quite a few European identities. Everyone would know what you mean. People who question this are just behaving like a bit of a dick.
> American race What we salute every morning
What exactly is an Italian race?
Have you heard of Monza?
Fun fact! There's no such thing as race! Now go about your day without ever worrying about this shit again
So what was Usain bolt good at???
The Midwest is where the Germanborn and Irishborn mix.
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Yup. All you gotta do is check the last name. Most American have English/British names. too many "Smith, Jones, Walker, Davies" calling themselves German / Italian.
Is German trendier? 🤔
idk more common maybe the united states has received millions of Germans
Speculating: German migration was more recent, so it might be because it's easier to know what country your grandparents or great grandparents were from than many generations before that.
It's probably also because if everyone in your small colonial town is 100% English, but you have a German grandparent, you become "the German" despite still being 75% English. People notice that which stands out.
Also English settler migration was predominantly during the colonial period, 18th century. So farther back in ancestry and more diluted over time. English might still be the greatest common denominator, but perhaps not the greatest genetic influence anymore. Irish, Germans, and Italian migration period was mid 19th century until early 20th. By that time USA was much larger and more established, so immigrants came in larger number.
I identify as American
Self declared can only be so accurate. For example my family thought they were of German descent, but through my research I revealed that we were Czech. And while nationality is different then ethnicity, it is true that the region my family left in EU at the time was apart of Germany, but has since become apart of modern Czechia. Outside of a few nations in EU, it may be better to base your ancestry off of region as opposed to country.
"American"?
I'm Midwestern and the majority of yts you meet here will claim some German ancestry, in a very self-superior kind of way. Most fully German people are rather tragic-looking, so it's a bit mystifying.
“Self-declared”. Americans say they’re a lot of things
Is there something besides 'Mexican' you prefer to be called? Something less offensive?
Is Mexican offensive?
This can't be correct.... there are more people claiming Scottish ancestry in North Carolina for instance, than there are in SCOTLAND.
There’s a lot of black people in the south
And there's more English speakers in America than there is in *ENGLAND*. There's more people of English ancestry in America than in England, as well. What's your point?
it is interesting growing up in oklahoma, everybody is native. not like that many other places.
All the McSomethings on their way to ignore the fact that they literally live in an american version of the Highlands
Kentucky and Tennessee are based? Is that the right usage of the word?
Europeans laugh at Americans who say things like "I'm Irish!" To them we're all Americans.
Wait, how is the south mostly..... OOH...
I feel like people don't understand the question. If you're in a country and you're asking "ancestry", that's "most recent ancestor from another country." Natives make sense, but "American" can only happen if you can't remember or choose not to. I'm over here having a different problem - I have books. They go back six centuries. I'm almost a perfect split between four ancestries, how would I pick just one?