thelurkinghorror, note that Finnish is given as one of the ethnic groups charted on the map that I link to in my post (#3). It says on that map that Finnish is the largest ethnic group in five counties in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
There are a lot of us in the South, and I suspect in the North as well who really are “American” for purposes of ethnicity.
I mean, I couldn’t claim any one ethnicity; from what we can tell, the family’s a hodge-podge of various ethnic groups- English, Welsh, Scots-Irish, German, French, Scottish, etc…
Yes.
After all, black Americans are (largely, excepting recent immigrants) a ‘new’ ethnicity, obviously with strong African derivation but not congruent with any actual African ethnic group, and with substantial European, and some Native, ancestry.
It’s hardly unreasonable for white Americans who are similarly a mélange of different European (and sometimes non-European) ancestries to see themselves as a new group, distinct from all of them.
Start a new thread if you need to discuss my father’s oddities. I think it’s strange that someone would have the self-confidence to know how much relevance a total stranger should give to his specific ethnicity.
And Danish and Swedish and Irish . . . OK, no French for me, but all the rest. I could say Northern European Mix, if that’s pertinent. And that’s assuming that all the great-grands weren’t condensing things.
The web site specifically says this about the “American” ethnic category:
“People select this ancestry either as a political statement or because their pre-American ancestry is uncertain.”
IIRC English used to be the biggest reported ancestry but in recent decades its share has collapsed. Perhaps other ethnicities seem sexier.
I’m surprised Michigan’s hispanic wasn’t the lowest one. If you see a darker skinned non-black person in MI, they usually aren’t hispanic but middle eastern or mediterranean.
What are “recent decades”? I am having trouble with Google, but it can’t be that recently at all, right? The peak of immigration was the last half of the 19th century.
An Gadaí writes:
> IIRC English used to be the biggest reported ancestry but in recent decades its
> share has collapsed.
Do you have a cite for that? I believe that for the past century or so the top ethnic groups have been German, Irish, English, and African (according to the usual way of defining ethnic groups). I believe that German-Americans have been the highest number, Irish the second highest number, and English-American and African-Americans very close in third and fourth places. Just in the past ten or twenty years, I believe, African-Americans have passed English-Americans as being the third largest group. Unfortunately, I don’t have any cite for this either. I’ve done some searching and can’t find anything.
Here we go: British Americans - Wikipedia
Ancestry 1980 % of U.S 1990 % of U.S 2000 % of U.S
English 49,598,035 26.34% 32,651,788 13.1% 24,515,138 8.7%
In the 20 year period between 1980 and 2000, the number of Americans reporting English ancestry halved even as the population of the country as a whole continued to soar. As far as I can tell, in 1980, roughly the same amount of Americans claimed English ancestry as German ancestry and while self reported German ancestry remains popular in subsequent censuses the English share has dropped by what seems to me a remarkable amount. I assume, rather than a cull of English-Americans, that a lot of people who in previous years identified as English pick their less common-or-garden ancestry. I imagine it probably reflects people’s increased awareness of and interest in genealogy.
Look back at the county-by-county ethnic map I linked to. Notice that there are significant areas with counties that are plurality-English. One of the is some of New England. Another is Utah and parts of surrounding states. (I presume that the Utah cluster of plurality-English counties are the home base of Mormonism.) So there are parts of the U.S. where it’s rare to put down “American” as your ethnicity on the census. So the apparent drop in the proportion of Americans who were ethnically English (and Scots-Irish and Scottish and Welsh) between 1980 and 2000 was almost entirely caused by people in the South (which does have a lot of people of those ancestries) deciding to answer questions about their ancestry by claiming to be just “American.”
Wendell Wagner, you’re probably correct that that’s the primary reason for decreasing amount of Americans claiming English ancestry but I don’t think that that ethnicity map you linked to proves it one way or another. Do you please have other cites?
Well, yeah. Nobody wants to be English :D. Surprising, though. Not that British decreased (and of course, those reporting “English” are even lower), that German wasn’t as high.