# Whats your ethnic background?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
**Created:** [May 21, 2010, 11:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238 "2010-05-21T11:44:49Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Turk\_February](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Turk_February)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 11:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/1 "2010-05-21T11:44:49Z")
Both your mom and dad
Mine is…
Dad German
Mom French
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### Author:  [@FairyChatMom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FairyChatMom)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 11:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/2 "2010-05-21T11:48:13Z")
Paternal parents and maternal grandparents all came from Poland in the early 1900s and settled in Baltimore.
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### Author:  [@scareyfaerie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scareyfaerie)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 12:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/3 "2010-05-21T12:05:21Z")
English, up until 1066. After that? Who knows?
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### Author:  [@campp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/campp)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/4 "2010-05-21T12:06:34Z")
German and Scottish, far as we know.
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### Author:  [@chela](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chela)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 12:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/5 "2010-05-21T12:10:40Z")
waiting for the poll…
I’m heinz 57
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### Author:  [@twickster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/twickster)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 12:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/6 "2010-05-21T12:12:43Z")
Lithuanian on my mom’s side – she was first generation American – and mostly English and German on my dad’s (a couple of those strands having gotten to the colonies in the 18th century).
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### Author:  [@VunderBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VunderBob)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/7 "2010-05-21T12:13:05Z")
I’m a mutt of continental northwestern Europe. My father’s family is highlands German/Swiss, my mother’s side is Swedish, French, and Benelux. Of all my ancestries, I identify with the Swedes first and the Germans second.
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### Author:  [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 12:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/8 "2010-05-21T12:14:44Z")
Ashkenazic Jew - Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian mix.
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### Author:  [@Richard\_Pearse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Pearse)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/9 "2010-05-21T12:24:21Z")
Irish English Swedish Danish Maori are the main ones.
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### Author:  [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 12:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/10 "2010-05-21T12:27:54Z")
Me - Scottish
Father - Scottish
Mother - Scottish
Grandparents - Scottish
Great grandparents - Scottish
Great great grandparents - Scottish
Great great great grandparents - Scottish
ad infinitum
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### Author:  [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qadgop_the_Mercotan)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 12:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/11 "2010-05-21T12:42:28Z")
I’m slightly over half Dutch, about 1/4 german, 1/8 english, and 1/8 mix of slavic, welsh, irish, scottish, scandinavian, french, and italian, with a bit of polish (and a few other odd lots) thrown in.
Why yes, I have extensively traced my ancestry!
Ethnically, I identify as “white. Very, very white.”
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### Author:  [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 12:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/12 "2010-05-21T12:42:51Z")
Mom’s side - English
Dad’s side - Irish
Yep, I’m white.
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### Author:  [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 12:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/13 "2010-05-21T12:52:18Z")
Father - Australian
Mother - English
My mother’s ancestors were all from a small part of the East Midlands, as far as I’ve ben able to trace them.
Though my father was born in New South Wales, his ancestors were born in the gold fields of Victoria. They probably had English or Irish descent, except for his mother’s father, whose name we don’t know, and who probably was Chinese. (My paternal grandmother was apparently illegitimate, and took her mother’s surname.)
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### Author:  [@Shark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shark)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/14 "2010-05-21T12:55:01Z")
My Mom’s side is easy…German
Dad’s side is more complicated…Scottish and Irish on my paternal grandmothers side. On my paternal grandfather’s side, his ancestors were born in Luxembourg, but the part of Luxembourg wasn’t Luxembourg anymore when they immigrated. They were then Belgians. They left within a few years of the “Third Partition” of Luxembourg after the Belgian Revolution which took about half of Luxembourg and gave it to the recently independent Belgium.
So…Scottish, Irish, German and Luxembelgian?
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### Author:  [@SanVito](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SanVito)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 1:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/15 "2010-05-21T13:02:41Z")
Both sides of my family have traced family trees back to the 18th and 17th centuries, and there doesn’t seem to be any name on the lists that doesn’t appear 100% English. My surname is Anglo-Saxon in origin.
However, my skin colouring isn’t very English and I’ve been told many many times that I look French. Go figure. My great gran’s middle name was Rosetta, so maybe there’s somthing furren hidden in the closet somewhere.
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### Author:  [@Zeldar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeldar)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 1:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/16 "2010-05-21T13:02:41Z")
Just guessing, since the research into family origins that my mother did in the 70’s only got back to early days in the USA without any clear documentation of European connections:
– English
– Irish
– Scots-Irish
– German
– French
– Dutch
As with most Southern families, I wouldn’t be alarmed if there are Native American strains or perhaps some Mediterranean and Eastern European ones.
The main surnames in my ancestry sound Northern European, so that’s about as close as I can call it.
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### Author:  [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 1:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/17 "2010-05-21T13:05:48Z")
> [@Turk\_February](#):
>
> Both your mom and dad
>
> Mine is…
> Dad German
> Mom French
To this Englishman, this looks like your dad was from Germany and your mother from France. But I’m guessing they’re not, and aware that this way of naming one’s “roots” is a cultural distinction peculiar to the US How far back do you trace it to assert their root ethnicity?
Me:
I count myself as English.
Parents:
Both are also English.
Grandparents:
Paternal grandmother: English
Paternal grandfather: English
Maternal grandfather: Northern Irish protestant
Maternal grandmother: White West Indian
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### Author:  [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/18 "2010-05-21T13:13:50Z")
I’m British and white.
Mother - Scottish.
Father - English (his Dad) African and Indian (his Mum; I only found this out a couple of years ago. AFAIK my Dad was just a white man with black curly hair who tanned really well. It is a bit weird to find out that your ethnic background is different to what you expected).
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### Author:  [@Anaamika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anaamika)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 1:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/19 "2010-05-21T13:14:59Z")
As far as I know we’re Indian (East) for a couple of generations. There is talk that there was a British gentleman somewhere in my ancestry but who really knows?
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### Author:  [@Illuminatiprimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Illuminatiprimus)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 1:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-ethnic-background/540238/20 "2010-05-21T13:16:11Z")
White British
Mother - English
Dad - English
Maternal grandmother - English (of Welsh descent)
Maternal grandfatehr - English (of Scottish descent)
Dad is adopted so don’t actually know much about his ancestery and he’s never been interested in really finding out. We suspect he may have been a product of an English mother and an American soldier, so I might be a quarter Yank (oh the shame! _wails_) but don’t really know for sure. Don’t actually care, to be honest, I find all this ethnic identity stuff to be a bit academic.
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