[QUOTE=AHunter3]
And what’s with the “American” throughout the South? Does that equate to “been so long we haven’t a clue”? I mean, talk about missing the point…
[/QUOTE]
I suspect that it’s not a coincidence that predominantly Scots-Irish parts of the country have the highest number of people identifying themselves as simply, “American.”
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I have to question what difference there is between the German ancestry of people of Ohio and Indiana and the American ancestry of the people of Kentucky and West Virginia.
[/QUOTE]
As I alluded to in my previous, post, there is a difference. The predominant ethnic group in Appalachia are the Scots-Irish.
This data comes from the census. On the census you are asked what your ethnic ancestry is. A fair number of people answer “American.” The highest ethnic group answers on the census are (ignoring the answer “American,” which really means that you don’t know the answer or that you don’t want to answer the question), in the following order:
(Note: This is assuming that Hispanic is not a single category. In fact, most Hispanics don’t put down “Hispanic” on the census form. They put down the name of a single country.)
It doesn’t matter whether you go by which answer people put down on the census form or by researching people’s ancestries and adding up the fractions for each person. It’s still as above: German, Irish, English, and African-American, in that order.
[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
It doesn’t matter whether you go by which answer people put down on the census form or by researching people’s ancestries and adding up the fractions for each person. It’s still as above: German, Irish, English, and African-American, in that order.
[/QUOTE]
I can’t see how you could come to this conclusion without data to back it up. I’ve already stated why I think the census data is flawed. Saying “no it’s not” isn’t convincing. Does anyone have historical immigration statistics that would confirm or deny the pattern?
[QUOTE=John Mace]
Yeah, this whole ethnicity thing in the US is, in large part, BS. How many of us trace all our ancestry back to one country? I trace mine back to at least 6 different European countries, and those are only the ones I know of.
[/QUOTE]
Actually, I really can trace all of my ancestry back to one country - Germany. My great-great grandparents came over on the boat and settled in one of those small, still very German towns in the Midwest. The family genealogy is pretty exhaustive back those four generations, but my relatives can’t seem to get it back any further. Our surnames are all a lesson in anglicizing German, to varying degrees of success. The credit card companies never spell my mother’s maiden name correctly!
I’m not going to tell you how many pounds of German I am, though. 
Ah, but where did they all come from before Germany? The poundages I listed for myself, for instance, are correct back to the point where my various ancestors came to America (except for the Shawnee great[sup]4[/sup] grandmother, of course), but there’s still some doubt before that. The possible French is a branch from one of those border regions that France and Germany traded back and forth repeatedly through history, and the possible Hungarian comes from the fact that there’s a very similar surname to my own in Hungary, that’s a lot more common than the German equivalent, so my paternal-line ancestors might have been from somewhere in Hungary before they settled in Öberreddenbach.
Me, I’m from traditional southern stock.
Dad is a family-history nut. As anyone who considers stock and parentage would tell you, that requires exploring lots and lots and lots of source-trees before you know much.
Hunters (father of father of father of father of father ad infinitum, the easy tree) = Scottish, emig circa 1600-something-or-others. Chased out of Scotland in some flavor of trouble, settled in Virginia.
McMaths (father of mother of father and etc upwind, pretty easy tree) = also Scottish also 1600s settlements
Jennings (mother of father of father, fathers upwind from there) = English, 1600s-1700s settlements
Bowen (mother of mother of father, fathers upwind) = Scottish, some English
Welch (mother of father of father, fathers upwind) = Scottish/English
Butler (mother of father of father of fatherl, fathers upwind) = English we think?
Turner (father of mother, fathers upwind) = not traced to American shore, English?
Farmer (mother of mother, fathers upwind) = Scottish / English we think?
Wright (mother of mother of mother, fathers upwind) = Irish we think?
MacKie (mother of father of mother, fathers upwind) = Scottish pretty sure?
Your basic redneck long-estab southern and/or Appalachian population is often old settlement, did not make it rich in the new world, generally lacks info on ancestry beyond a family bible etc.
The Irish potato famine is better remembered as a cause of immigration but earlier political quarrels esp between England and Scotland circa 1600-1800, but those also gave reason for folks to emigrate, sometimes kind of suddenly.
I know this sounds like I am explaining the very behavior I previously questioned, but I still don’t understand why they’d not assume they were English (if they knew no better) rather than put down “American” which obviously can’t predate 1776.
[QUOTE=AHunter3]
I know this sounds like I am explaining the very behavior I previously questioned, but I still don’t understand why they’d not assume they were English (if they knew no better) rather than put down “American” which obviously can’t predate 1776.
[/QUOTE]
Nitpick: A lot of “traditional Southern stock” isn’t English – it’s largely Scottish (as your family history demonstrates).
A huge number of Germans settled in Central Texas in the 1840s, and retained their language and culture a very long time. Check out a central Texas map, and pick out all the German names- though a lot of German pronunciations have been butchered over the years (the town spelled “Gruene” is pronounced “Green”).
In many small central Texas towns, German influence only began to wane a generation or two ago. In such towns, it’s still common to see churches with names like “First English Lutheran”- they HAD to emphasize “English” because a lot of Lutheran churches still conducted services in German, as late as 1970 or so.
Indeed. The first of my European ancestors to come to America, one Michael McGuire, came over in 1775, expressly for the purpose of an opportunity to fight against the English.
[QUOTE=AHunter3]
And what’s with the “American” throughout the South? Does that equate to “been so long we haven’t a clue”?
[/QUOTE]
Well, yeah. That’s the case with my family. We’re obviously not native to the continent but that’s about all we know. As far back as our records go every one of my ancestors has lived in in the southeast USA, and whatever their original ethnicities were has been lost to history.
So “American” would be my answer, I’m afraid.
[QUOTE=astorian]
A huge number of Germans settled in Central Texas in the 1840s, and retained their language and culture a very long time.
[/QUOTE]
It’s interesting to compare German polka music to the traditional music played in northern Mexico.
[QUOTE=astorian]
… a lot of German pronunciations have been butchered over the years (the town spelled “Gruene” is pronounced “Green”).
[/quote]
That’s actually pretty close to how it would be spoken in German. The “ue” corresponds to an umlauted “u”, which sounds like “ee”.
To the best of my knowledge an umlauted u doesn’t sound so much like “ee” as the deumlauted “ue”. I’m not a German scholar though so I could be incorrect in that.
[QUOTE=Wheeljack]
Well, yeah. That’s the case with my family. We’re obviously not native to the continent but that’s about all we know. As far back as our records go every one of my ancestors has lived in in the southeast USA, and whatever their original ethnicities were has been lost to history.
So “American” would be my answer, I’m afraid.
[/QUOTE]
“American” is always my answer as well. There’s been enough genealogical research in my family to suggest that I have ancestors from England, Scotland, Germany, and a handful of other countries, but ethnicity is by and large a cultural affiliation. My family has not retained any sort of linguistic or cultural traditions that would be defined in any way other than American, and besides, it’s been many, many generations since my ancestors arrived here. It would seem silly for me to identify as anything other than American.
You shape your mouth for “oo” and you try to say “ee”, that’s ü
[QUOTE=BetsQ]
“American” is always my answer as well. There’s been enough genealogical research in my family to suggest that I have ancestors from England, Scotland, Germany, and a handful of other countries, but ethnicity is by and large a cultural affiliation. My family has not retained any sort of linguistic or cultural traditions that would be defined in any way other than American, and besides, it’s been many, many generations since my ancestors arrived here. It would seem silly for me to identify as anything other than American.
[/QUOTE]
Such a good point: there’s a huge problem in terms here. People (I’m looking at you, Census Bureau) confuse “ethnicity” with “race” (as used in American government demographics) and “culture” and “nationality.” Ethnicity is primarily a matter of identity, and needn’t have anything to do with genealogy. “American” is a really good name for the regional British ethnicity that developed on this side of the Atlantic, parallel to East Anglians and the like. Logically anyone whose main ethnicity derives from that, no matter what their ancestry, is ethnically an American. What people in this thread seem to be asking, though, is something like “heritage nationality” or “heritage ethnicity.” And even then it’s not easy. I identified as part Italian upthread, but my immigrant ancestor was born in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, died in the United States, and spoke Neapolitan rather than Italian. “Italy” was the name of the country he lived in for a couple of decades in his youth, and largely irrelevant to his life, his ancestors’, or his descendants’. So how reasonable is it to identify as Italian-American?
[QUOTE=astorian]
A huge number of Germans settled in Central Texas in the 1840s, and retained their language and culture a very long time. Check out a central Texas map, and pick out all the German names- though a lot of German pronunciations have been butchered over the years (the town spelled “Gruene” is pronounced “Green”).
[/QUOTE]
Yup. Not to mention that Oktoberfest is a pretty huge event in the DFW area, at least in my memories of the 80s. Up here in the PNW, I had to poke around to find out where the nearest Oktoberfest was (Puyallup, for the record).
My family went from Müller to Miller…another branch went from Kolby to Colby…but another branch gets to show off their German-ness proudly with the name Gutknecht.
The two fairly significant ugly patches of the 20th century are probably a big reason why you rarely see anything “German” but every town has an “Irish” pub.
w/r/t the food thing, I wonder how much German food is just “food”. Out of the three classic “American” foods, Hot Dogs…they’re a sausage, nuff said, Hamburger, I actually had to wiki it to know that it’s probably not German, (and then there’s pizza.)
If offered German food at someone’s house, I would probably think it strange but not ethnic unless they specifically told me it was German food. It’s sort of in the food Uncanny Valley – not different enough to be considered exotic but not appetizing enough to our regular tastes to eat regularly.