out out OUT OUT! Damn double-post. What happened to the SDMB while it went dead this afternoon (other than double-post me…)?
Minnesota, eh? For all we know, your father’s father any my mother’s father are one in the same. Mom was born in St. Paul in 1928.
BTW: one of my maternal great-grandfathers took part in Sherman’s March to the Sea. Mom still has his discharge papers.
Laura,
By the power vested in me by virtue of my mostly Irish blood I degree you to be “Irish For a Day” . . . term to begin at midnight this Saturday March 17th.
Go forth clad in green and drink well.
<----- (note color)
Seriously though, what is the American St. Patricks Day really become but an excuse to get sloppy drunk on copious amounts of green beer . . . followed by the thrill of peeing “oscar the grouch green” for two days ?
Great OP SexyWriter . . .
nice to meet ya,
NM
Thanks NM! I’m having a Guinness now. And nice to meet you too 
-L
Well, Spain, actually 
A lot of dark Galician Celts ended up in Ireland way back when, so there’s Spanish in those “Black Irish.” The pale and blond or orange-haired Irish are supposed to be more Nordic, by way of traveling Vikings – who are also responsible for the fact that the Irish are, on average, the tallest Europeans (not that you’d know it by my family).
So if the Spanish brought the irony, where did the Irish get that tendency to romanticize self-destruction that has caused so much trouble over the centuries? One fears it’s native to Celts…
Catrandom, who heartily agrees that St. Patrick’s Day celebrations are an extended, socially sanctioned ethnic slur, though St. Patrick was, of course, a gentleman.
Good point. There was never a mass exodus from Wales in the way that there was from Ireland during and after the famine. Also, I imagine the Welsh were predominantly Protestant so there were fewer obstacles to intermarriage. You would have thought that the Welsh language would have remained a distinguishing feature, though, as it has done in Patagonia?
[MommaRiddles] What, you’re trying to oppress my people now? Trying to deny our culture? ** I ** know what I am! I’m Jewish! Oy, vey iz mir! [/MommaRiddles]
Great story SexyWriter & everyone else! I have always wondered why I’m fasinated with where my people come from yet I know it doesn’t effect who really I am. I always attribute it to needing a sense of belonging.
Anywho, thanks for sharing!
~t
I guess I should chime in here as the rock of genaeological stability in this swirling eddy of Eurodescent.
I’m the biological offspring of my parents, who were the biological offspring of theirs, etc. My sister and I look like our parents, who look like their parents, etc.
Technically I’m Scottish on my father’s side (the Morrisons) and Dutch on my mother’s side (the Vandivers; everyone you meet named Vandiver is at least distantly related to me).
But since everyone on both sides has lived in Georgia going back 200 years, those two facts have little to nothing to do with who and what I am.
I’m a Georgian. I’m a Southerner. I’m an American.
And if you see me in Iceland or England this May, please remember I most certainly am not a “Yank.”
There are Welsh speakers in…Patagonia?!
I’ll be!
An interesting question that I haven’t time to pursue: how many Welsh immigrants to the US actually spoke Welsh (or, more to the point, spoke only Welsh)? I think English penetrated more deeply into Wales than into Ireland, and AFAIK not many people here grew up speaking only Gaelic (unlike, say, German or Italian). Since the Irish and Welsh may have already known some English (even if only a little) before they got here, they’d be more likely to use it.
There are Welsh speakers in…Patagonia?!
I’ll be!
An interesting question that I haven’t time to pursue: how many Welsh immigrants to the US actually spoke Welsh (or, more to the point, spoke only Welsh)? I think English penetrated more deeply into Wales than into Ireland, and AFAIK not many people here grew up speaking only Gaelic (unlike, say, German or Italian). Since the Irish and Welsh may have already known some English (even if only a little) before they got here, they’d be more likely to use it and less likely to create a monlingual town. Total WAG - anyone with evidence one way or 'tother?
They’re the descendants of miners who went over there in (I think) the mid-19th Century to set up mines. A Welsh-speaking friend tells me that they speak the same langauge as people in Wales, but whereas British Welsh has absorbed a number of English words, Patagonian Welsh has absorbed a number of Spanish words. They have an Eisteddfod and everything.
I don’t know about historically, but at the moment the Welsh language seems to be in much better shape than either Irish or Scots Gaelic. About 20% of the population (~500,000 people) describe themselves as Welsh-speakers and a large proportion of them will have Welsh as a first language and English as a second language.
I suspect you’re right, that very few of the Welsh emigrants to the USA spoke only Welsh and therefore there was a natural tendency for them to slip into English by the second and third generation.
But surely living in Kilburn you’ve run across people who talk like Vinnie Jones but still insist they’re “Irish”?
Yes I have, but most of them are the children of Irish parents and many of them still have family there. It doesn’t seem to persist to the Nth generation here in the way it does in the States.
There’s a very interesting story about this on the BBC News website today: One in four Britons claim Irish roots. It suggests that Ireland is fashionable at the moment so people are keen to play up and Irish ancestry, however distant.
I don’t think it’s a problem as such (though it can be confusing when the “Scotsman” you were talking to on-line turns out never to have ventured beyond Iowa) but, as you pointed out recently in another thread (I forget where), it becomes a problem when people see themselves as representative of the residents of a country they have never even visited, especially where this has a consequential effect on US foreign policy, Hollywood movies, etc.
Fair point. OTOH, I’ve never met an Irish-American who didn’t see him- or herself as both Irish and American, whereas I know plenty of Anglo-Irish who’ll go into hissyfits if you dare to call them English. You hear a lot of “Jesus was born in a manger but that didn’t make him a horse” from this crowd.
Of course, there’s a lot of politics in that.
I don’t deny that, but they tend to use “Irish” or “Italian” or whatever as shorthand for “Irish-/Italian-American” in way that I (as a foreigner) sometimes find confusing. The example of the Scotsman from Iowa above wasn’t hypothetical.
Bear in mind that most British racism is of the “send them home” variety (cf. the Daily Mail). There are sensitivities about emphasising somebody’s ethnic origin without also nodding in the direction of their nationality. Some British-born people would take offence if you described them simply as “Bangladeshi” or “Jamaican”, because it implies that they are not British and, consequently, that they have no right to remain.