1 generation ago (parent) [I don’t know if this counts: mom’s grandmother was born & raised in the US]
4 generations ago (great-grandparents)
5 generations ago (g-g-gr.)
7 generations ago (4×g-gr.)
8 generations ago (5×g-gr.)
10 generations ago (7×g-gr.)
12 generations ago (9×g-gr.)
13 generations ago (10×g-gr.)
I’m only counting the most recent generation, i.e. the foreign-born parents of my US-born ancestors. Otherwise, some ancestor immigrated to the US for every generation before me up to 14 generations ago, except for my grandparents.
I don’t know much about my grandfather’s side of the family (ironically, the Kitchen side, my surname), but all of my other known ancestors were here before the Revolution. And many of them were here in the early 1600s.
My mother’s ancestors came over at various times from various northern European countries from the 1840s up to the '80s; one of my aunts has done some genealogy and has them fairly well documented.
My father’s family is supposed to have come over at least a century before, possibly Jacobites fleeing England and Scotland, but the details of who they were and when they arrived are lost to history.
Both my g-g-grandfather and my husband’s g-g-grandfather show up for the first time in the 1850 census. I’m not sure when they came over, but it was after 1840.
Depends on what side. My dad’s side has been here since the Mayflower, my mom’s mom was born in England and my mom’s dad’s grandparents came to America from Ireland.
Well, I am exaggerating a bit and a real genealogist would point out that have simply gone back to my 7th great grandfather on both my father and mother’s lines. So, my claim of 10 & 10 is based on my mothers paternal line. Trying to trace her full matrilineal line ends after six generations with a woman born in 1816. Her line is yet to be found.
I have most pairs of ancestors back 5 or 6 generations, but it is sketchy past that. Especially the female lines. So, I don’t have all 1022 ancestors in my tree and thus no idea if the missing ones were born in the US.
The interesting bit to me is that, having traced (almost all of) the siblings of all each ancestor I have found, there is no one of historical note. A few look like scoundrels, but no criminals. Just generation after generation of farmers in upstate NY and PA. Only a handful of soldiers and only one ancestor died in uniform (of illness).
My dad’s side goes back to roughly the 1840s or 1850s. My mom’s side I think is around the 1750s or 1760s. One of my ancestors went missing in the Revolutionary War.
Amazing to me to read some of these responses. I myself am first generation born in the US of immigrant parents (from China by way of Taiwan). With relatively few exceptions, I know almost nobody of my generation who didn’t grow up with at least one foreign born grandparent. I mean when growing up - not my own family and friends but classmates in school, etc., in NYC schools. Going around the table on a ski trip once showed that “The Old Country” meant the DR, Guatamala, Italy, Ireland, Poland, China, Korea, Latvia, Hungary, India, Egypt… And of course Ashkenazi Jews. Almost everyone grew up with a non-English language spoken at home by someone, if not to them.
I know NYC is supposed to be a magic cauldron of immigration but I sort of assumed much of America in general, by percent of present population, was within 3-5 generations of arrival, what with the huge waves of immigrants in the late 1800s and then again in the 1960s.
I think it’s because families of recent immigrants tend to live in neighborhoods with a lot of other recent immigrants. I know it was true in my own case.
The reponses concentrate on people’s most distant American ancestors. They’ll often have more recent arrivals in their family tree closer to their own generation. And after a few generations here you pick up some those long timers in your own family tree also.
And I forgot, my wife’s mother’s father was born in Pennsylvania, the son of recent immigrants, so there’s one more generation back my kids can go.
It’s an exponential funnel looking backwards. Ten generations ago I had more than a thousand ancestors of that generation (if I’m doing my math correctly) and I certainly don’t have stats on all of them. One branch that I do know back to 15 generations (which is way-the-heck backwhen, someone born dunno-quite-when who died in the late 1500s)… Thomas Walton of Oxhill Warwickshire, England had a kid, William Walton, born in 1593, married Alice Martin, their child Daniel Walton, born in 1660 came to the American colonies. Eight generations later my great-grandmother was born and I knew her when I was a kid on up through 8th grade.
It would be cool to know all the branches back that far but that’s a formidable number of family lines to trace.