I was gifted an AncestryDNA test since then, and was matched with a genetic community called Acadians of the Canadian Maritimes, but not with anything that looks like French or Western Europe ethnicity. So that was interesting.
Aren’t you Ancestry.commies disappointed you’re not related to anybody famous?
Whaddaya mean? I’m related to everyone famous.
Albeit, none of them particularly closely, and some less closely than others.
I will have you know that my earliest Irish ancestors fought against you bloody Brits in our theater in the Napoleonic Wars, which was only 8 generations before me! And I’m half German, but they burnt that bridge in the 20th Century. Despite our reputation as drunkards and layabouts, it still beats being Nazis.
Harumph! Indeed, HARUMPH!
And us honkies are all related to Charlemagne. Dude got around.
Casuals. My elders were into that decades ago. We have a well-known contemporary asshole on our tree (I’m sorry) plus ill-fated nobility, rumored French aristocracy, and claims of being descended from an ancient goddess. Good stuff.
AncestryDNA is just the DNA test.
Commies?
Actually, I already knew that I was related to famous people without the DNA test.
When Irish eyes are smiling,
Without the risk of pain,
With a bat and bit of slaughter,
You can eat the gooey brains.
Not as much as Genghis Khan.
I thought immigrants were supposed to assimilate and become Americans? All this marching around in funny ethnic outfits claiming allegiance to a foreign nation and spouting that “Erin Go Bragh” nonsense instead of speaking proper English is terribly unpatriotic.
what I love is people who consider st pats an "American holiday " (who are mostly neither catholic nor irish) but consider cinco di mayo satans birthday …
Didn’t they ban drinking on st pats for most of the 1900s until they decided they needed the money of drunk american tourist?
Huh? What makes Cinco de Mayo Satan’s birthday?
I have no idea. As a patriotic American I see it as another excuse to get drunk.
It’s one of the minor itrritations in my life that I can’t use the term “Irish-Catholic” to describe the Irish-Catholic political group in Aus anymore. Becaue they’ve stopped describing themselves as Irish-Catholic. Which they aren’t: they are Australian, and their parents were RC.
But their political position is still identifiably Irish-Catholic, which made the descriptive term convinient.
I think this rather unintelligible poster is trying to say that some see celebrating Cinco de Mayo as un-American (even though it’s primarily an American holiday).
I’m fairly sure that is a large part of the mix, yes.
Their, “We’re Related” app is the worst. Go back far enough just about everyone is somehow related. XD
Opinionated bunch aren’t we? Also folks didn’t seem to be getting it, so …
Oh I wouldn’t take that bet. To me it’s like Cinco de Mayo. That isn’t a holiday celebrated in Mexico but, damn we’ve made it into a fun time here! Woo-hoo booze, food, music.
People have different motivations for saying they are (insert European country here).
One reason I became so interested in family lineage years ago was because a teacher, when I was 12 years old, made an off-hand remark that stung me so badly I still feel it to this day.
She was our Social Studies teacher, and I was 1 of about 6 white kids in the class of around 30. The rest, including the teacher were African American, and one of the white boys who was a very orange-y ginger kid said something about his family being Scottish, and this teacher said:
“White people ain’t got no culture. All ya’ll do is steal other people’s culture. Words like ethnicity and culture do not belong to you. That’s for us.”
I remember it like it was yesterday, and it upset me very badly. I went to the bathroom and cried. A teacher had just basically told me I was nothing.
Some teachers have no idea how powerful their words can be on impressionable children. And she wasn’t the last teacher I had in grade school who truly believed this and repeated these sentiments. Sure, I could go home and tell my parents what they were saying, and their reaction was, “Eh, they are full of it, don’t listen to that.” But to hear it regularly and to know my classmates were being shaped to believe it too, was very hurtful. Everybody has heritage. That belongs to everyone. It also did not help that “Roots” had recently been on TV. I know now these teachers were ignorant, but that didn’t help at the time.
So maybe I over-compensate a bit in an effort to overcome damage to my identity from this environment, but I am proud of the 3 strong Irish lines in my ancestry. The rest is mostly British/English.
With time and maturity, I now also feel like I can understand and empathize, just a little bit, with other students who are underrepresented in classrooms, because I have worn that shoe all through 12 years of grade school. My takeaway from it into adulthood is that whoever is in the majority has a tendency to treat whoever is in the minority badly. My school was over 80% black and most of my teachers were black. Some of them were wonderful, some were horrible.
I don’t go around saying I am “Irish”, that would be stupid, but I have educated myself & read a great deal of Irish history, I find it fascinating, and I am instinctively drawn to Irish things. There’s an unexplained familiarity there.
I also know that if I ever get to go to Ireland, they will look at me for the crazy American that I am.
So, thanks to a complete butthole of a teacher, I am much more of a history nut than I might have been and much more of a seeker of knowledge, so that is a GOOD thing. And part of that is to “prove”, if only to myself, that I have roots as well. And no, I didn’t “steal” them from anybody else. Heifer. Words like culture and ethnicity DO belong to everybody.