[Rusty0604]

All the ethnic groups listed have the majority of their roots in America for many years, with the exception of the Mexicans which are number 4 only because their number doubled from 1990 to 2000. May be more now in 2013. The changing face of America.

[Pan_Yan]

Most of my ancestors were German or English, but with several who fought in the Revolutionary War (on the good side). My wife’s family are a mix of French-Irish Huguenots and Scandinavian. My kids couldn’t be much more of a mixed bag. Why would we call ourselves anything but American? Unlike what the Daily Mail implies it has nothing to do with politics. Does the writer call himself a Saxon? Is he a proud Norman-Viking?

[x]

All the ethnic groups listed have the majority of their roots in America for many years, with the exception of the Mexicans which are number 4 only because their number doubled from 1990 to 2000.

Sure, the whole "I didn't cross the border; the border crossed me," thing gets overdone to make it seem like Mexicans were here all the time.

In fact cities like Los Angeles were predominantly Anglo-Saxon not so very long ago, but

1) border counties along the Rio Grande and elsewhere were predominantly Mexican and New Mexico was largely "Spanish" and Indian for a long time, and

2) large waves of Mexican immigration go back at least to the Mexican Revolution of a century ago.

That's about the time when many European immigrant groups came over.

[Ol' Sox]

We’ve been here a looooong time - our first arrival was in 1614 to Jamestown aboard the ship Treasurer. The family was here, both patrilineal and matrilineal, before the Revolution. We’ve got Kings and Rutledges (yep) and Crocketts (yep), Livingstons (yep) and Sherwoods. Settled Virginia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Connecticut. Personally, if I only counted my father’s line back, I’d be Scots Irish (among the first to arrive), but there’s English, Cherokee, Irish, German and French in there. We have absolutely no fragments of tradition from any of those lines. So when my daughter’s 4th grade teacher did a project on heritage, we said American. This confused her because “everyone comes from somewhere else”. I explained that 400 years and 14 generations of living in one country was plenty to establish one’s heritage. She took a look at our family tree, filled with Signers and Pioneers and Veterans and allowed as how we made a good case.

[EternalVigilance]

I LOVE this thread.

[Rannug]

I use to listen to the “old folks” talk about how we settled in Louisiana, by way of France, in the late 1500s. Now I am one of the old folks and I don’t know squat. I thought that maybe Jane Gallion could straighten out things.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Rusty0604.

By far the largest ancestral group, stretching from coast to coast across 21st century America is German, with 49,206,934 people. The peak immigration for Germans was in the mid-19th century as thousands were driven from their homes by unemployment and unrest.

By "unrest" is often meant the "kulturkampf", sandwiched between the Napoleonic Wars and the three quick wars Otto von Bismarck devised to reconstruct Germany and build his treaty system -- suffice to say, the transformation of the patchwork of German states into modern unified Germany was not all nice and neat.

Regardless, I resemble that remark -- some of my German ancestors arrived in the second half of the 19th century, the rest have been here over 300 years. I highly recommend genealogy as a hobby, and when it all shakes out, my guess is, about 20 percent of you are my cousins. :')

[carlo3b]

Hey, to all of my Italian cugini, I did everything I could (5 children)with the tools that were available.. However, not even a dot to show for my efforts in Houston.. If I had it all to do over again I would have worked even harder.. :)

[workerbee]

On this map, does German equate to Swedish and/or Scandinavian and/or Slavic?

My father grew up in Alabama and while I know very little about those before him, it was sort of a “family known” that our surname was truncated from a more complicated Slavic version.