Posted on 09/29/2013 10:57:42 AM PDT by Rusty0604
Census data shows heritage of 317 million modern Americans Clusters show where immigrants from different nations chose to settle Largest ancestry grouping in the nation are of German descent with almost 50 million people
African American or Black is the second largest grouping with just over 40 million people Almost 20 million people claim to have 'American' ancestry for political reasons and because they are unsure of their family's genealogy
49,206,934 Germans
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.
41,284,752 Black or African Americans The census map also identifies, Black or African-American as a term for citizens of the United States who have ancestry in Sub-Saharan Africa.The majority of African Americans are descended from slaves
35,523,082 Irish Another group who joined the great story of the United States were the Irish and the great famine of the 1840s sparked mass migration from Ireland.
31,789,483 Mexican And from 1990 to 2000, the number of people who claimed Mexican ancestry almost doubled in size to 31,789,483 people.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
How about that! Our relatives probably knew each other.
Of course, my family wandered off the reservation by coming to Texas. Both sides of my family came down here long ago. I’m a 7th generation Texan on my father’s side.
Well, my forebear Little Page Proctor, who fought at Boonesborough, ended up having 20 children altogether. So that tends to make the family tree branch out pretty quick. :)
I agree; and sometimes it has to do with the surrounding majority's point of view. When I lived in an Italian neighborhood, I was "Irish", because most of the other NW Europeans who lived there had been; but in Amish country I am "English." In reality I have ancestors from many European countries as well as native American; my European antecedents have been here for the most part of 400 years; and there is barely any predominance among those ethnicities. While there might be a Welsh or German surname, when you look back in the genealogy, the ancestors might have been Dutch, Irish, English, whatever. People move around. Either that, or Americans, as a nation of immigrants, are predominantly descended from energetic people who move around.
Up until 2009, I was always proud to say merely that I am an American.
Lord Help my spelling. OUR
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?
Same here. Almost all my ancestors were here around 1620-1650. They kept moving west as most of them were not the first born, so out of necessity, they moved, and kept moving. Once branch lived in Texas when it was a Republic.
actually they may have been botjh
many (like my own families) went back and forth between Scotland and Ireland every few generation following the weather and fertile soil etc..
if their was famine in Scotland they went across the north end where it was only a short distance to Ireland 2 generations later the grandchildren came back..and so on..
My great grandfather William McClimont and his wife Anne Irvine were from Drumadonnel and Ballyroney, County Down, Ireland but in 1860 they stopped off to live in Dalry, Ayrshire near their McClymont and Irvine distant cousins for 5 years before they went to New Zealand..John worked in the iron mines in Ayrshire..
I also had Campbells in Ireland...William McClimonts mother was a Campbell born in County Down...Dromara...
John Proctor is my 11th Ggrandfather on my mother’s side, although there is at least one marriage that is rather tenuous. I am confident that William Parker, who arrived in Jamestown in 1616, is my 9th Ggrandfather. My father’s family, surname Thomas, were relative late-comers and did not arrive in Virginia until 1635.
Howdy cousin!
I expect they did. If your ancestors settled on the James River, as mine did, they would have been just down the river from each other.
As long as my ancestors were first sons, they stayed in Virginia, but in the early 1800’s they came to Texas. We are not really sure when, but my GGgrandfather was buried near Jefferson in the mid-1800s. I have the exact dates in a book put together from research my great-aunt did.
We might be kin!
They were a distinct group historically. A large group of Scots and northern border English were given a land grant in Ireland to settle in the 17th century by the English Kings, forming Ulster, now Northern Ireland. This is how that region became predominantly Protestant. The English Crown confiscated those Irish lands in order to transport some of their own internally persecuted population that resisted English rule, contributing to the strife over religious difference from the rest of Catholic Ireland that lasted until the 20th century.
After some generations in Ulster and various degrees of intermarriage, a group of those "Ulster Scots" or "Scots-Irish" migrated to the United States in the mid-18th century, forming the backbone of the Southern white population.
A great book about the history of the Scots Irish in America is Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by James Webb, former Deputy Secy of the Navy and former U.S. Senator.
The Northeastern establishment, including the New York finance and media people, are enormous f'n snobs about who they believe are the racists.
My Kast family had a prosperous farm in Schorie County and they were cheated out of it..I went to the Old Stone Fort this past summer..
most of the other families went south to northern PA “Pennsylvania Dutch” (really Deutche)...
Kast refused to have any English speaking and writing man cheat him again and went up the Mohawk River amongst the indians determined to live where no white man would covet his land again...
He built a trading post and traded with the indians and fur trappers and later his daughter my 6th great grandmother Sarah Kast and her Irish husband Timothy McGinnis ran it..
However the rebels burnt it down in 1777 and imprisoned that same 60 year old wida woman and her daughters and grandchildren in Fort Dayton...
They escaped when General St Leger came to the area and fled north to Canada...
DNA is powerful!
I hear you.
I’ve identified more than 95% of the “first-comers” in my family tree, and the vast majority of them were in the 1600s. Only a handful came in the 1700s and another handful in the first half of the 1800s. None after 1840 that I’ve been able to find.
Oh, and one indigenous line that probably goes back at least a thousand years. :)
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.
I think the DailyMail writer correctly gives the nod to the many White Guilt liberals who call themselves merely "American" because they think they are being noble not to acknowledge the ethnic origin of their forebearers.
When you get back to the early 1800s or earlier it gets harder and harder to trace all of your lines because of incomplete records (except perhaps in New England), so many people may not know for sure how many of their colonial or Early Republican ancestors were English, Scottish, "Scots-Irish," Catholic Irish, Welsh, German, or Huguenot--a lot of the French and German names were anglicized out of recognition. A Scottish-sounding surname may be a clue but perhaps only the direct male line was Scottish and the rest was English or something else.
When I saw the heading I thought the thread would be about the ancestry of the counties as political units--that is fairly simple to figure out from the information in The Genealogical Helper about parent counties, but probably easier to find nowadays with Wikipedia. Not that anyone cares about that information unless you need to find out where some information would be located.
Then why would those areas be all over the deep South?
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