There, that is what I was trying to convey. A simple(?) test for genetic markers will reveal none of those.
The usual way would be the older generations informing the younger. If they withheld the information, it makes me wonder how or why the normal communication broke down. My mother’s ancestors immigrated to Baltimore from Ireland 300 years ago, and through 10 generations we’ve never lost sight of where we came from.
You seem to be under the impression that ethnicity is fundamentally genetic. Why do you think so? It’s not. Ethnic groups historically form and dissolve regardless of genetic relationships. Yes, certainly, some ethnic groups have very strong genetic bonds on average, but that doesn’t preclude some members from being from unrelated genetic lines.
Ethnic groups are largely a social phenomenon.
I agree it’s a loose connection, DNA and ethnicity. But it can be relevant sometimes. For example that commercial for one of the genealogy/DNA site/services where the guy was brought up thinking the family heritage was German but the DNA test said mainly British Isles and no German. I’m not sure those commercial tests are 100% reliable but that seems a plausible case IMO where the test puts the family lore in a different light. Although the implication of the commercial, that the guy is now going to dress up in a kilt, is ridiculous IMO. If you have no real connection to Scotland via any conscious connection or custom in your family, why would you be wearing a kilt just because the plurality of your DNA is from there according to a commercial test? But for some people this is a hobby kind of thing. Nobody is particularly judging or discriminating against them based on either what their family thinks it ‘is’ or what a DNA test says. It’s kind of trivial perhaps but they can have fun with it if they like, it’s no skin off my nose.
Again I think it’s probable that for a lot of white Americans this sort of thing was very marginal in their upbringing and they assume that’s the case for all other white Americans unless they just recently arrived. But again in some families it’s quite real. My ancestors came over from sometime not long before 1830 to 1867 (latter date is exact). But the family is very Irish, or at least was until this generation. That really wasn’t an affectation in my parents and especially grandparent’s generation. It was really who they were, very typically in appearance, beliefs, behavior. In Europe this kind of idea doesn’t go against the general idea of what their societies are as much as in the US. Concentrations of ethnic Germans in various places in Central/Eastern Europe were very real for generations (though not as much after WWII). In the US if you say you are X ‘old’ ethnicity it’s common for others to then share stories of the person they know who had one great grandparent who was X so now they’ve embraced X as their pseudo-ethnicity regardless of the other 15/16’s, etc. But it’s not like that for everybody.
By this time, “American” is a valid “ethnicity”, defined as a [del]mongrel[/del] delightful mixture of various European ethnicities.
My father told me he was mostly “Scotch-Irish” which I ignorantly took to mean a mixture of Scotch[sic] and Irish. (I don’t if the substitution of “Scotch” for “Scots” is considered vulgar; one avoids the need to choose between Scot{ch,s} by using the term “Presbyterian Irish.”)
In the U.S., ethnic ancestry mostly means where your ancestors emigrated to the U.S. from. There are some exceptions to this. People whose ancestors emigrated to the U.S. from Canada usually say whether their ancestors were French Canadian or English Canadian or some other ethnic group. In other words, they are giving their ancestry two countries back, not one country back, so they are saying that their ancestors emigrated from country X to Canada and a later generation emigrated from Canada to the U.S. People who are of Jewish ancestry usually say that they are of X Jewish ancestry, so someone whose ancestors were Jewish and who came to the U.S. from Germany will usually say that they are of German Jewish ancestry. Often, instead, they will say that they are of Ashkenazi or Sephardic (with some differences on spelling of these terms possible) ancestry, depending whether their ancestors who came to the U.S. were from the northern or southern part of Europe. People whose ancestors came to the U.S. from Ireland often say that they are of Irish Catholic or Scotch Irish ancestry. This is dividing Ireland into two pieces (Republic of Ireland vs. Northern Ireland or Catholic vs. Protestant or those who lived in Ireland a long time vs. those whose ancestors emigrated from Scotland a few hundred years ago). There are some other exceptions that I will skip for the moment.
Hermitian, what are the last names of your great-grandparents (including the maiden names)? We can probably figure out most of your ancestry based just on that. Do you honestly not know any part of your ancestry?
It’s important to keep in mind that ethnicity, like race, is a concept that is going to be pretty specific to a time and place. Like, in Rwanda, being Hutu or Tutsi is pretty damn important. But take a Rwandan and plunk them down where I live in SoCal — they’re going to be “black.” Once they speak, maybe “foreign.”
Where I’m going is that it’s not weird to be a white American and not have a sense of ethnic identity. There are historical reasons for this. For hundreds of years, being called white here has had not just social but legal significance. Even before the revolution, laws in the colonies kept marking clearer and clearer lines between white and black people. Those erased other identities, like national origin or class status.
Your sense of a lack of ethnic identification is similar — with obvious differences — to what led Malcolm X to adopt the X! America didn’t care where your people came from that much. Just what they looked like.
As the son of one European immigrant and the grandson of another pair, I grew up with a strong sense of ethnic identity. But living where I do today, I’m just white 99% of the time. It’s not nearly as interesting as being Danish-Swedish-Finnish, but it’s how it is. And that erasure took 1.5 generations.
You’re not alone 
I oversimplified a complicated and long historical process/trend here, but I hope my general point makes sense. Yes, we’ve “othered” some of the waves of European(ish) immigrants, but the overall trend has been to fit them into our (stupid, overly simple, unscientific) race-based classification.
It’s also quite possible for a genetic test to not notice a fraction as small as (say) 1/64 of some ethnicity, even with good comparison data. It’s even possible for a person to have no DNA at all from a particular ancestor, even though they really are an ancestor.
Sometimes it becomes garbled like in a game of telephone. Somehow we lost the details of where my great-great grandfather came from in Switzerland. My great-grandfather might have told my grandfather, but he died when I was 15 and evidently didn’t say anything specific to my father. When i began investigating it seemed as if he might have been born in St. Gallen. When I mentioned this to my grandmother, she said that my great-grandfather used to say “Remember Svengallen” (as she pronounced it.) But she didn’t think to mention it until I brought it up.
She also got her own family history mixed up. She said her grandfather had been captured at Antietam during the Civil War and died in Andersonville Prison Camp. She got the last part right, but he was actually captured almost two years later at Petersburg. When Antietam was fought, he was safe in a fort in Washington DC, and Andersonville hadn’t even been established.
My mother would dearly like to know where her family was from in Ireland but her father was orphaned by the age of nine. (Most of the rest of his family also died while he was growing up.) She was born to his second wife when he was 50, and by the time she was growing up he was a grumpy old man who never talked about the past. We didn’t know about all the tragedy in his family until we started doing the research.
Sometimes they don’t have to inform them directly. My paternal grandparents spoke French in the home, as did my two oldest uncles. My father was the first to speak English from birth. But the family name is oh-so-German. It doesn’t take much to conclude that the family originated someplace that was either German or French, depending on who won the last war. Alsace-Lorraine it is!
Further research confirmed this hunch.
For some of us living in Europe (England- hang on- checks yup, still Europe today), ‘researching our family tree’ is pretty simple. My Mum’s side of the family lived in one place, handing down one farm to the oldest son for hundred of years, and most of my ancestors from that side for at least 5 or 6 generations are buried in the local graveyard. I can do hundreds of years of genealogy research with a 20 minute stroll in there.
On the other side, they didn’t have enough property to be really established like that, but they lived in one town for at least 3 or 4 generations and all the surnames of those people are specific to that local area. Wherever they were before that, it wasn’t far away.
Sure, there’s always the chance someone wasn’t the bio father of their official kid, but up until the last few generations, most people just didn’t move round all that much, especially if they were farmers, and if my Great Great Great Grandmother had a secret fling, almost everyone else around was also of the same ethnicity anyway.
As an example - my parents came over from England, divorced later when I was quite young. I didn’t get along with my stepmother so I didn’t talk much with my dad, and she was determined that I not have any contact with my mother. The only living relative this side of the pond is my brother, equally uninformed. So most of what I know is from hints and snippets, and mainly from the pieces I found cleaning out my parents’ house and items passed on to me by my mother’s husband. I have a rudimentary family tree - many errors I had to correct. I was surprised after hearing about Yorkshire growing up to find my father’s family was from Wiltshire 100 years before moving to Yorkshire; my mother’s family was from a big city, with a common enough name it’s pretty hard to trace just through free information on the internet. I suspect there are plenty of stories like this - a few generations of incomplete information, mobility, and family drama and many North Americans have only a rough idea of their ancestry.
However, in a place like Yugoslavia (or any European country), everyone knows who everyone else is and where they came from. I assume that first of all, those places are like Olde England only worse - even if they speak the same basic language, the accents are as distinct as cockney and Yorkshire or Scots. Plus, names are often a clue. In many cases, church affiliation too. And except for the melting pots of the big (usually capital) cities, people have lived the same place a long time and are part of the same ethnic culture.
To top it all off, often they all hate each other’s guts. Before the breakup of Yugoslavia, I knew a fellow who was an air-conditioner repair guy. he’d go home there to visit relatives, and often get a chance to do some contract work while he was there. He said the car rental places were used to the problem and didn’t charge customers for damage - that if you rented a car in one place, and parked in a different part of the country, people could tell where you were supposedly from and you’d find dents on the sides of the car from it being kicked, or a broken tail-light. Any surprise they got all genocidal on each other when the restraints were off?
I believe there are issues with the accuracy of those tests, since they rely on past subjects’ results for comparison. (And participation in those tests is much higher in some groups than others.) In other words, it’s closer to Wikipedia (crowd-sourced) than serious genealogical research (document-based). My hunch is that since commercial DNA testing is, well, commercial, it probably doesn’t do as much error correction as scientific studies would do.
Yes, there’s no reason why “White American” can’t be considered an ethnicity.
Look at many other ethnicities—go back far enough, and you find that the ethnicity arose from a coalescing of people from many different places.
Claiming an ethnicity to me means having some kind of personal allegiance to an ethnic feature, perhaps language, attire, hairstyle, cuisine, religion, recreational tradition, Art or craft forms, membership organizations, travel, something.
The fact that your ancestors came from so many different places isn’t the critical factor in your ethnicity. It’s whether there is anything in your life that you do or follow or believe that makes you part of an ethnic group.
Yes, it has some connection to something you inherited from family members, but it’s not DNA that’s the crucial factor.
This is why this 23 and Me stuff is largely garbage. DNA testing might be important to health and other applications. But it’s not the pivotal factor with respect to ethnic identity.
And new ethnic groups get created all the time.
Look at groups like Caribbean or Pacific Island Indian ethnicities. They’re not perfectly Indian in terms of language or religion. They’re something of their own.
I’m pretty sure that as recently as the 1900’s family history and heritage was important for most people in Europe and America (likely other places too, but I wouldn’t know). One of the things you did as a parent along with teaching your children to chew with their mouth closed, and not to swear around adults was telling them about their family history, far-off relatives, and the like. Even today, most people will look into their family history and connections when they reach a certain age (usually around the time they start having kids of their own).
Finally, there have always been people and groups who are keen about tracking family history, and ancestry. A couple branches of my family are like that, and most mormons I’ve met/heard-of are big on genealogy. As long as at least one person in a family knows the history and passes it on, it’s not that hard to track ethnicity back 3-4 generations.
Also, it’s nice to finally meet somebody who also cheerfully describes themself as an “American mongrel”.
It varied a lot by location, social class, etc. My mother’s side of the family is from half a dozen places, and the only cases where we get beyond great-grandparents it’s because they have exotic lastnames (one’s Italian and may have actually have been, uhm, how to put this… created by my great-grandfather’s grandfather; the other may or may not be from thereabouts of Nancy); my father’s side is from a cultural group which famously has a hard-on for genealogy, but it has its roots in a political incident that took place shortly after the War of Succession (Philip V linked our right to attend Parliament to being able to prove that our ancestors on four sides had; when that still produced a greater roster than he liked, he upped to eight… but the same people who had four had eight, pretty much). Like a lot of Navarrese I can trace my ancestry to the Middle Ages (to the last time Parliament had met by the time Philip came along), as that side of the family has kept copies of the Philip V’s “Blood Tests” and maintained careful records afterwards. Just in case, you know… But, before Philip V, we didn’t keep such records; we were able to run the tests only thanks to the copies of our Parliamentary Minutes that happened to be kept in Barcelona.
Well, my mom was Amish, her family grouping came over from Altekirchen Germany in the mid 1600s so you could grant me being half German. My fathers side of the family got here in the beginning, and another thread of the family is documented to moving to New Amsterdam when it was still Dutch, and a third thread of the family played kid ping pong back and forth between a particular spot in France, one in Holland, one in Flanders and one in Lorraine - one of those continual intermarrying to keep the peace deals all the way back to the early 1100s, and a final thread to a bunch of kids swapped back and forth between Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man. For my paternal fooferaw, west European mutt?
I self identify as American, and as an immigrant despite the most recent over was 1720ish.
Yep, I grew up in Chicago in the 80s, and it was still a city of ethnic enclaves. (And still remains so to some extent.) To me, not knowing your heritage/ethnicity is odd. It was very common to ask “What are you?” (as in, what is your ethnic background) well into the 90s. I can tell you the ethnic background of every single one of my childhood friends; it was that known and spoken about. Then again, most of us were pretty close to our “home countries.” My parents were both born in Poland. Most of my friends were similar, or only one or two generations back. So it was not difficult to know.
Yeah, if you’ve got a Labaziewicz that’s not gonna be Greek. Smith may actually be a Schmidt and Xανθια may be transcribed in different ways for different relatives (fun!), but Javierre or Echegoyen are unlikely to come from transcription errors or simplifications.