Does the average citizen know what country his background is from? Do they know which country exactly they come from? Do they know if they are colonies or not?

Do they just say it’s somewhere in Europe/Africa and they don’t care?

33 comments

  1. Imagine you’re an early American. Your paternal grandparents are English and Welsh, your maternal grandparents are Scottish.

    Where are you from?

    Now extend that by 10-ish generations of immigration from across Europe and the world. What country does anyone who didn’t just get here “come from?”

  2. I can trace some of my genealogical lines back to the 9th or 10th centuries. Another of my lines goes back to Priam: King of Troy. That one, while awesome, isn’t as rock-solid verifiable as the others.

  3. I can’t speak for the “average citizen” since there are 330 million of them. But I can speak for myself.

    My father’s father migrated from Sweden when he was a child, My mother’s family has an English and Scots-Irish ancestry.

    That’s all I know.

  4. Depends on what line you want to know about. I’ve tracked ancestors back to damn near every western European country and at least one Native American.

  5. Tens of millions of average Americans are immigrants, who were born in the country of their ancestors.

  6. I thought I was mostly german all my life. My moms mom literally came from germany as a kid. My dad has a german last name. Then a few years ago I took one of those ancestry DNA tests. Turns out im like 54% british and only like 9% german. I don’t know of a single family member who came from the UK. I would say most of us don’t really know at this point.

  7. I do, because both sides of my family only got to North America in the 1900s. I know the towns they came from in Italy and Scotland. I’ve been to one of them. It was wild seeing my last name all over the place because it’s a very uncommon last name otherwise. I actually found a guy over here whose family is from the same small town because he had a very similar last name that had just been Anglicized differently, which was pretty cool.

  8. Like everything else, this varies. Recent immigrants will have a stronger connection to their ancestry. Genealogy is also a popular hobby (although I am not sure “hobby” is quite the right word).

    Personally, I’ve tracked my ancestry back to Europe – but the most recent immigrant to the US was in 1805 or so. Mostly my ancestry is Dutch, English, Scottish, and a little Irish. So, Northern European. A lot of us have a very mixed ancestry.

    There are also a lot of folks, at least on reddit, who think we spend too much time thinking about our ancestry.

  9. Most white Americans have some vague idea of what country their ancestors are from, though this depends on how recently their family immigrated.

    Descendents of African American slaves generally have no idea what specific African country they come from. Those records were not kept.

  10. It depends heavily on the family. My dad side of the family knows their history all the way to when the first migrants got to America in 1872. Mom side of the family doesn’t know much besides there being a horse thief somewhere in the family tree.

    Alot of Massachusetts people can trace their ancestry to the mayflower.

  11. I think it’s important to remember that even for people’s families who got here in the 1800’s, that isn’t actually that many generations. On my dad’s side it was my Great-Grandfather’s Grandfather. I can look up census records of the place where I grew up and see where people’s families came from since it lists where they were born and where their parents were born. For a lot of people this isn’t some far off thing, it’s in living familial memory.

    Also, people, especially on reddit, seem to play up the idea of name Anglicization. In my experience, this is not the case, at least in the Midwest with families that came here 100-150 years ago. The names are pretty much exactly the same but sometimes with an umlaut or eszett omitted. Most people could do a simple google search of their last name and it would be pretty easy to figure out where your name comes from. My school yearbook looked like a damn German phonebook.

  12. My father is English. Records are very spotty in england for my family. But on my mothers side i know quite a bit.

    Eliphaz Shelton is one of my ancestors. He was a revolutionary war captain and gifted a county in virginia the land where the courthouse sits now. His name is etched into the courthouse building.

    Edit: my mother is american.
    [here is my DNA.](https://imgur.com/a/Vrtjp78)

  13. Average, no, mot much.

    Now my family yes. My mom has done a stupid amount of genealogy. I know where my ancestors are buried, where they came from in Europe, and we know quite specifically where they lived and who they married going back to the 16-1500s. My mom found those church records for some branches.

    Some came here as dirt farmers and others came over with the Mayflower crew. In the time between they have been everything from farmers to blacksmiths to doctors to entrepreneurs and salesmen.

  14. Oh yeah. It’s not uncommon to ask “what you are” when it comes to immigrant background. And we would never just say Europe. I’m Dutch and German. My paternal great grandparents came from there. On my mom’s side my poppy traced ours back to the Middle Ages. My grandfather’s family came from England when colonies were first established.

  15. I know where my great grandparents came from, but earlier than that I have no idea. All of that knowledge got lost when most of them were killed in the Holocaust.

  16. I can trace back to my grand parents. Missouri on one side, Louisianan on the other. Heard there is some Irish and Scottish somewhere, don’t really care. I am an American and that’s it.

  17. I would say most know at least a little bit, even if they aren’t very connected to their ancestry.

    My mom’s side is French, Italian, and Polish. My dad’s side is Swedish, Dutch, and German. On average I can trace back to 3rd great grandparents I believe? Farther back on some, but not as far back on others.

  18. I can trace back most of my ancestry to when they immigrated to the US. Most came in the early to mid 1700’s from Ulster and Wales. The farthest back I can trace it is a branch of French Huguenots that came over in 1685 after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

  19. I’ve got a few relatives very into genealogy. One of them I trust his work a great deal because that’s the side that’s recently to America (last immigrant about 120 years ago). So while I don’t know off the top of my head what cities and states in Germany or which counties of Ireland my mother’s side came from, I know who to ask to find out. He only had to go a single generation or two past his own grandparents recollections to learn these things and we’ve even got old photos on the Irish side of where one branch lived in Dublin.

    On the other side, my aunt traced a lot more generations, which leads to a lot more chances for mistakes, either on her part or because of bad records. That side is old New England farmers, so the most recent immigrants are in the mid 1800s, from Ireland and Scotland. But they married into the farmers already there, so that’s back to colonial times and probably the 1600s in England somewhere.

    Whether I say “various parts of Europe” or go into detail depends entirely on the context of the conversation.

  20. I know nothing, unfortunately. My dad was adopted and my mom doesn’t know her ancestry. It would be neat to know, but It wouldn’t cause any change in my personality or change the fact that I’m American.

  21. Is the average American descended all the way back to colonial days, or by now are most of us only 2-4 generations in? After waves of immigrants from the 19th century on, Im not even sure.

    Either way, there’s enough of us descended from recent-ish immigrants that I wouldn’t assume any American youre speaking to descended from some far back colonial settler.

    I’m second generation Americans so I can easily identify where my grandparents are from down to the city they grew up in.

  22. That’s going to depend hugely on how recent their families immigrated.

    I have many friends who either immigrated here themselves or were born in the US to parents who immigrated and have maintained close ties with their families’ countries of origin. Of course they know their background. Someone who was born to a family that has been here for centuries would have less knowledge, especially if their ancestors were brought over involuntarily and enslaved.

    Three of my grandparents were immigrants. One of my grandfathers was born in western Canada (birth town and province redacted for some level of anonymity) and came to the US as a young man. His parents immigrated there from Scotland and the Netherlands (I don’t know which cities/towns). Two of my grandparents were born to Mexican parents in central Mexico (birth cities and states redacted) and came to the US as teenagers. My US-born grandmother was born in northeastern Lower Michigan (village name redacted) to US-born parents; her ancestry was supposedly Scots-Irish, but many generations back.

  24. My great grandparents on my mothers fathers side came over from Ireland just before the turn of the 20th century. My moms mother side is also Irish but also Scot.

    My fathers maternal grandfather was also from Scotland. He paternal side is damn near impossible to track because his father was adopted in the early 1900s. The only thing we know about that is the family the adopted him had a French last name, which means I have a French last name but as best I can tell I have no biological connection to France.

    I am closest to my mothers paternal family so if anyone ever asks I just say I am mostly Irish, which is true, but there is some more mixed in there.

    My wife’s family is 100% from Ireland. Her father was an immigrant from Galway and her mothers parents immigrated from Roscommon.

  25. I’d guess a lot of Americans know at least a little bit about their heritage. But me? My dad is from texas and his parents are from texas. My mom is from…. ??? I literally don’t know. and her parents are from New York. I was born in Connecticut. That’s about as much as I know for myself.

    Family lineage isn’t important to me, but my mom is really into it.

  26. I say most have an idea of where but not when.

    I know both because of a family member who spent a lot of time and money building a tree that I am going through now and adding living relatives, photos, and additional relatives he did not do.

    In largest to smallest my heritage would be

    English
    German
    Belgium
    French

    I have a hard time claiming polish or Ukrainian because even though they were born, and raised there ethnically they were German.

  27. I know that on my father’s side my ancestors were German speaking Swiss. My 1st ancestor to come here was born in Bern, Switzerland in the early 1600s. His given name was Hans Rudolf, he came here as part of the Anabaptist migration, and that he was a leader in the Church of the Brethren. He settled in Cumberland County Pennsylvania and that the spelling of my last name changed then. I know that I am descended from his sixth of seven sons but that son was the 1st son by his second wife. I am the 1st one in my direct line to be born outside of Cumberland County Pennsylvania since 1640.

    On my mother’s side I’m Scot-Irish and my family has been here since the 1700s, other than that we just have family lore, that says that the man we are descended from was an officer in the Continental Army and was George Washington’s Aide-de-Camp at Valley Forge and after the revolutionary war he got into politics and was killed in a duel by a political adversary. I’d like to know for sure that we are descended from this man but my mother’s family were not the record keepers that my fathers were and this family lore is all word of mouth passed from generation to generation.

  28. Most Americans at least have an idea of the major countries they’re from.

    Personally, I’m easy. 75% Italian, just under 25% German, and a tiny bit Swedish (like 1 person 5 generations back was Swedish).

    I’d imagine I know more than most, but many Americans know generally where they’re from.

    Edit: although from at least the people I know, many African Americans I know who descended from the slave trade don’t know the specific country (or at least the country of those ancestors)

  29. I mean my family only came here 110-115 years ago and I knew most of my great grandparents (who emigrated here). So yeah I know my ancestry. Now I’m not exactly sure beyond that- I’m not heading to Sicily and searching church records to see how long they lived in Palermo.

  30. I only know info on my family as far back as my great grandfather. He was in WWI got a bullet through the leg, but survive the war.

  31. Fun fact about Black Americans, unless we’re immigrants or from immigrant families we don’t know what our specific ancestry is.

    Besides the obvious fact that our families we’ve been in the United States longer than many other groups, our cultures were largely suppressed and we generally intermarried between each other over time. Thus, we are a mix of various ethnicities from across West Africa that merged together to form our current culture.

    Until somewhat recently I didn’t know that some people didn’t know this. I only found out when a Vietnamese-American woman asked what part of Africa my family was from. To be clear, I wasn’t offended since it was an honest question. But I just thought I’d share this in case anyone reading this wasn’t aware of that history.

  32. I think the whole claimed ancestry thing is different in different parts of the country, and vary in accuracy and specificity depending on how far removed the person is from their immigrant ancestor.

    I know some people who can easily say that they are half Malaysian-Chinese, and half Hainan Chinese, or half German and half Irish.

    Others like myself have immigrant ancestors so far back that we actually only have limited knowledge of where in Europe the ancestors came from. In cases like that, someone named Snyder may identify themselves as German-American, or someone named Le Fevre may identify themselves as French-American, even if they probably have some English or German blood in them.

    And that is not even talking about how most black Americans have little to no knowledge on where exactly their ancestors came from before they were kidnapped and enslaved in the Americas, nor the ethnic makeup of the slavemasters who would often rape black women, with the product of that rape being considered black (hence why almost all black Americans have at least some white DNA).

    I personally just identify as ethnically white American, since my most recent immigrant ancestors came to this continent in the 1850s, while the vast majority of my immigrant ancestors were living on this continent by the 1750s (and there were many ancestry lines of mine which I could not find the immigrant ancestor for, dating at least pre-1700). While I am not from the south, I know that the identification of simply ethnically “American” (or white American as I call it) in the south is very prominent amongst white southerners whose ancestors came to this country too long ago to remember.

  33. I’ve done my ancestry. I know what country most came from, what city/town, many occupations, etc. I know when a lot of them arrived. Some as early as the 1600s. The last two in 1867.

    So far I have about 5-10 who fought in the Revolutionary War. Found at least one who was at The Battle of Yorktown when General Cornwallis surrendered.

    I have German records back to the late 1600s.

    Some ancestors are easier to find than others. I wish England had a repository similar to Scotland’s People. I have ancestry all up and down the UK, but not having a centralized parish record website makes researching England and Wales from the US hard.

    Some I haven’t even attempted to research – looking at you, Sweden. They’ve got a website that’s supposedly pretty good but my ancestors arrived in “New Sweden” (modern day Delaware) in the 1600s. That plus the patronymic naming conventions sound like a nightmare.

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