You could probably find out by doing some genealogical research, if you wanted to. But there are a significant number of Americans who just list their ethnicity as “American,” and that works as well.
As far as Europe goes, ethnicity in many cases corresponds with nations, but not perfectly so. There are several multi-ethnic countries, or ethnic groups that span several countries, and as mentioned borders have shift.
You can break ethnicity down as fine as you want. For example, the “Scotch-Irish” in the US are different in religion and culture (or were) from the Catholic Irish who mostly emigrated later.
My great-great grandfather emigrated to the US in 1864. He was born in the German part of Switzerland (a fact that had been lost to us until we did some genealogical research), but may have been raised in Germany, emigrated from there, and was listed on most records in the US as being German.
Of my 16 great-great grandparents, one was Swiss (and gave us the family name), three were from three different German kingdoms (there being no unified German state at the time), and 12 from Ireland. Since my mother’s family emigrated most recently, in the 1870s, we retain more Irish traditions and identify mostly as Irish. Still, my mother’s favorite dishes to prepare include not only corned beef and cabbage, but also pork chops and sauerkraut (plus meatballs and spaghetti because our neighborhood was mostly Italian.)
Well, neither of my parents had any siblings and they were very different ethnically. My dad was (IIRC) English/Scottish/Irish and my mother was Jewish with her ancestors vaguely eastern European. Their parents were not happy about the marriage.
Neither of my parents were interested in their genealogy and I guess I inherited that feeling. I am the eldest surviving member of my family and have no desire to research my ethnicity.
Yugoslavia was very divided along ethnic lines. Croats lived in Croatia, Serbs lived in Serbia, etc. They each had their own religion and dialect. If they lived in a border area with mixed ethnicities they at least knew what religion they were or at least what their parents were. If there was intermarriage they probably knew when it happened.
Many Americans are a mishmash of European ethnicities. I’m not – my father’s parents were Jewish (early 20th century immigrants from Ukraine and Latvia), my mother’s parents were German-Swiss, emigrated late 19th century from the Lucerne area. It’s a known known.
My brother in law did the DNA thing and it came back 99% English.
Of course, the fact that the borders of the different states didn’t correspond exactly to ethnicity led to “ethnic cleansing” and genocide when Yugoslavia broke apart, particularly in Bosnia where there were large areas with different ethnicities.
Why would that suggest tall tales? It is, in fact, quite common for an American to have a little Cherokee in there somewhere. Or some other tribe, but as I understand it, Cherokee is the most common.
Because while there are many Native American tribes, the ancestry stories I hear are nearly always Cherokee, specifically. No doubt, some of them are likely true (even if maybe the ancestry’s from a different tribe), but the stories seem to come up so often that, at least IMO, it defies belief.
And, as this article notes, it actually isn’t that common, if we’re talking about non-Hispanic white Americans:
Yes, that’s an average, but it’s still a tiny number: much less than 1% of the average “European American”'s genome.
Is that really true? I mean, I don’t really know. My father’s surname broadly suggests an origin in the HRE. And the family settled within the giant swath of the United States where the majority identifies as “German.” But that only accounts for a single line of male ancestors (and then, not for much). My mother’s surname might be British (maybe English, maybe Scottish, maybe an anglicized version of something else entirely), but again, that only accounts for a single line of male ancestors. I’m not sure I have any real sense of where my family came from before the American Midwest.
Sure you can have many ethnic groups in one country - nationality and ethnicity are not always the same. For example, there are a lot of ethnic Italians in some South American countries. And to give you my own example, my father’s family is Gottschee. They are German-speaking Austrians who in the 14th century settled in what is now the municipality of Kočevje in Slovenia. When my grandparents were born there, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It then became part of Yugoslavia and eventually Slovenia. We are ethnically Austrian, not Slovene - but really, we’re ethnically Gottschee because that culture is most likely a little different than Austrian- Austrian.
So how do I know I’m Gottscheer? Because I know my grandparents were born there . Because the neighborhood I grew up in was so German that we distinguished between the Gottscheers and the Bavarians, and to this day there’s a Gottscheer Hall in that neighborhood. My kids know we’re Gottscheer - but their kids probably won’t get any more specific than “German”
Yes, the Trail of Tears was very effective at spreading Cherokee ancestors across the population.
And yes, among those Americans who have Cherokee ancestry, it’s usually only a single-digit percentage. Like the people generally claim, “a little bit in there somewhere”. OK, maybe such a small percentage is meaningless, but it’s not false.
This isn’t in any way to dispute the “messiness” of ethnicity which seems to have become the main topic, but I think there’s something relevant to the OP but completely absent from this thread: completely independent of language, religion, or knowledge of a person’s history or family, people look like their ethnic group.
When I was growing up I always had the same question as the OP—someone would say another person ‘looks Polish’, but I wouldn’t see it. Since moving to Chicago, I’ve become very familiar with that specific (but to me fairly undefined) set of features. Certainly not all people of Polish heritage are recognizable as such, and I’d never claim that anybody has “forensic precision” at this. But this is a skill, learned over time and repetition, which many don’t have. Since then, with wildly varying accuracy, I’ve become familiar with traits of quite a few different groups. This usually occurs by getting to know one person, learning about their heritage, then seeing others who looks similar and being curious if they share it. Certainly I couldn’t do this without spending time in a major city.
To be fair, the article also notes that a complicating factor is that many Native Americans have been reluctant to participate in genetic testing, meaning that it’s absolutely possible that there are white Americans who do have some Native American ancestry, but the genetic testing services can’t identify it, because they don’t have enough data on Native Americans.
From here, only 7.2% of the US population identifies as “American” rather with some specific ethnic group. This category probably includes mostly European-Americans who either don’t know or don’t care about the details of their origin, or are so mixed that they don’t identify with one particular group. It may also include some people who want to state that ethnicity for political reasons.
Now it’s true that there has been a lot of intermarriage between European-American groups, but the majority of people have a good idea of their main ancestry, even if they don’t know all the details.
I suspect another complicating factor is that it was popular to “explain” a Black ancestor as a Native American instead. I know there were several early baseball players who claimed to be Native Americans or Cubans who were actually Black.
There are surely some people of various mixed European backgrounds who say that, but statistically it’s heavily concentrated in Appalachia and among whites in the South, see map in article. Also a lot of Appalachian people who give ‘American’ as their ethnicity are not actually widely mixed but of predominantly so called Scots-Irish background, immigrants to Ireland from Scotland and other Irish Protestants who later migrated to the US. And it includes areas where most people trace most of their US ancestors to the area in which they still live.
That map only gives most common identification in an area (counties looks like), so surely there are people from eg. the Upper Midwest and northern Plains of mixed northern European background who say ‘don’t know/care’, ‘American’ etc. but it’s apparently most common in that region to give the originally dominant group among white settlers in the area, German in that large area. It isn’t that Appalachian whites are more mixed, probably the opposite, it’s just more the ethno-regional custom there to say ‘American’ when referring to origin in the British Isles, and mainly Scots-Irish.
Somebody said white ethnicity is real for fairly recent immigrants from Europe but semi-arbitrary otherwise. I agree it’s semi-arbitrary for a lot of people, but it’s not so arbitrary for others even with long roots in the US, even when it’s not their custom to name that ethnicity, as it often is not for Scots-Irish in Appalachia.
A few months ago a friend of mine on FB was shocked his 23 and Me (or Similar, I forget which one he did) did not show more First Nations (Cree and Mi’kmaq) ancestry. Someone posted this article to his timeline.
Me, I know I am roughly half Finn on both sides (both grandmothers were born to Finn immigrants) and my Dad’s father was half Scots and half descended pretty clearly from United Empire Loyalists who went to southern modern-day Ontario after 1780. My maternal grandfather is a mish-mash of various Western European ethnicities mainly but not exclusively British. So I say half Finn and half British Mutt, which is not strictly true but close enough.
A DNA test may not reveal much about his ethnicity that is not better known from his known family history and culture. Consider the extreme hypothetical case where he was adopted and his genes tell nothing concerning his ethnicity.
I concede that with proper analysis and interpretation these types of testing may reveal something; they use them to try to deduce the movement and admixture of prehistoric European peoples, for example. It seems like you need a proper expert or two to interpret the results, though, and anything too far back would not shed light on ethnicity, which is volatile on the order of a couple of generations, anyway, which brings us back to the immediate family history.
Fifty-some years ago, when we were of school age, my brother and I went to each of our grandparents and asked them what the names (including maiden names for the women) of their parents were and what they were told by their parents that those parents’ ethnic ancestries (which meant national ancestries) were. They all told us, so we put those eight ancestries together to say that we were one-half of ancestry X, three-eighths of ancestry Y, and one-eighth of ancestry Z. Our ancestors all came to the U.S. sometime between the late eighteenth century and the late nineteenth century, so we figured it was likely that our grandparents knew their own ancestries.
