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What's your heritage/ancestory?


Hunter2_1

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Haven't done one of them spit tests and don't plan to (don't want the gubermant havin' my DNA 'n crap!).  But also, more seriously...as a historian, i'm more interested in the cultural heritage than DNA heritage.  And i traced my ancestry the old fashioned way.  With some musty old documents and stuff.

On the one side, it's all hardcore ethnic German-speaking Prussians from the heartland who got a bigtime head start on Hitler's lebensraum thing by just migrating to the Ukraine to Do Farming like a couple centuries early.  Then goofed the whole thing up by intermingling with a bunch of German-speaking ethnic Poles and Russians.  And boogied out of town (aka the continent) before even the First of the World Wars started.

On the other side, it's more confusing.  Just a bunch of Scots and Irish folk, with a French Huguenot twist...who ended up in America pretty early on.

 

So in short.  Typical white European mongrel or whatever.

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20 hours ago, Hunter2_1 said:

I thought there would be more English in the US, considering most of the surnames and town names (oh and language) are English. Is it just that the English were THAT imperialistic that it didn't actually need that many to spread the culture like wildfire? hehe.

You have to keep in mind that the places and towns and stuff aren't always exactly named for the immigrant populations that eventually populate them.  You also have to keep in mind that a crapton of immigrants back in the day would intentionally Anglicize their surnames hoping to avoid persecution and whatnot.

Like say, a Müller or Møller might become a Miller.  A Braun might become a Brown.  A Rossi might become a Ross.  A Piccolo might become a Little.  A Gerritsen might become a Garrison.  History of ancestry is weird like that, especially with colonial stuff.

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9 minutes ago, Tugboat said:

You have to keep in mind that the places and towns and stuff aren't always exactly named for the immigrant populations that eventually populate them.  You also have to keep in mind that a crapton of immigrants back in the day would intentionally Anglicize their surnames hoping to avoid persecution and whatnot.

Like say, a Müller or Møller might become a Miller.  A Braun might become a Brown.  A Rossi might become a Ross.  A Piccolo might become a Little.  A Gerritsen might become a Garrison.  History of ancestry is weird like that, especially with colonial stuff.

Oh OK. I'm sure the rest of the country is different, but having spent time in New England (guess that's the give away), I've been/seen; Ashford, Avon, Berkshire, Bolton, Bristol, Canterbury, Manchester, Derby, Durham...etc etc, so just assumed it was English immigrants settling and naming the new settlement after their hometown. According to Wiki, however, only 8% of the population identify with English ancestry.

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12 minutes ago, Hunter2_1 said:

Oh OK. I'm sure the rest of the country is different, but having spent time in New England (guess that's the give away), I've been/seen; Ashford, Avon, Berkshire, Bolton, Bristol, Canterbury, Manchester, Derby, Durham...etc etc, so just assumed it was English immigrants settling and naming the new settlement after their hometown. According to Wiki, however, only 8% of the population identify with English ancestry.

Yeah.  haha.  New "England" is probably a bit of a tip off.  :P  You're obviously going to end up with a bunch of early colonists hanging out, naming everything they find after Old England things they remember.  When the immigrant folk from elsewhere move in, you're gonna get a lot of "don't blame me, i just live here...i didn't name the place" scenarios...

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23 minutes ago, Tugboat said:

Yeah.  haha.  New "England" is probably a bit of a tip off.  :P  You're obviously going to end up with a bunch of early colonists hanging out, naming everything they find after Old England things they remember.  When the immigrant folk from elsewhere move in, you're gonna get a lot of "don't blame me, i just live here...i didn't name the place" scenarios...

Makes sense. Where do the white populations in the South West tend to originate from? Is that simply immigrants who landed on East Coast moving West as part of the "gold rush", or is it just layers and layers of different waves from all over? 

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12 hours ago, Tugboat said:

And i traced my ancestry the old fashioned way.  With some musty old documents and stuff.

My family tried to do this, but could only get to Ellis Island for my mom's side. Her mom's parents come over from Bohemia when it was still a country, right before WWI. Any other records were pretty much destroyed when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia during WWII. 

I'm sure a DNA test would show things from everywhere, but I know a few generations back. My dad's parent's come over from Mexico in 1923.

My mom's grandparents on her dad's side came over from Sicily in 1909. We've actually seen the pages from Ellis Island from both sides of my mom's family. 

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46 minutes ago, MrDrew said:

My family tried to do this, but could only get to Ellis Island for my mom's side. Her mom's parents come over from Bohemia when it was still a country, right before WWI. Any other records were pretty much destroyed when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia during WWII. 

I'm sure a DNA test would show things from everywhere, but I know a few generations back. My dad's parent's come over from Mexico in 1923.

My mom's grandparents on her dad's side came over from Sicily in 1909. We've actually seen the pages from Ellis Island from both sides of my mom's family. 

Yeah.  WWII will do that to some records.  heh.  xD

I'm fortunate i guess, in that both sides of my family came over to North America before either world war (a long long while in the one case).  Makes it a little easier.  Can be real tough to trace immigrants fleeing during, or right around those sort of conflicts.  Often meticulous record-keeping isn't a top priority.  And WWII had a habit of being incredibly destructive, in addition to all sorts of fuzzy/forged/made up documents in some of those places that got filled with war and a bit o' chaos.

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37 minutes ago, bluemushrooms said:

Where the diversity at.

listed so far:

France
Irish
British
Russia
Italian
Scottish
Portugese
Norwegian
Dutch
Nicaraguan
Ukrainian
Indian
Polish
Latvian
Georgian
Cherokee
Welsh
Maori

 

Looks like a pretty diverse range to me

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