Ancestry map of the United States

Alexander Fishkov, Ph.D. student Computer Science

With the 2000 Census release, the U.S. Census Bureau prepared an interesting map of U.S. counties color-coded by ancestry with the largest population. Since the map was not updated in the subsequent years, we decided to use the 2013 ACS 5-year data to recreate the map.

If we look at the general ancestry reporting statistics, we can see that people became more willing to share this information about themselves. Ancestry was specified by 17 percent more individuals, while the overall population only grew by 10 percent.

According to a 2000 Census Brief on the topic, the largest ancestry by number was German, with 42.8 million people. Other popular answers were Irish (30.5 million) and African American (24.9 million). The top 15 ancestries according to the 2000 Census are presented below, taken from a 2000 Census brief:

The American Community survey for 2015 (5-year estimate) reveals changes to this list in the present time. While the overall U.S. population has grown by 30 million (from 281 million to 311 million), European ancestries including English, French and Italian have declined in numbers. Other European ancestries either stagnated or have shown only a modest increase. At the same time, we see that a self-reported “European” ancestry found its way into the top list. Native American ancestry experienced a huge decrease of 2.5 million, which is nearly one-third of its total number in 2000. African American ancestry is now ranked second and exceeds Irish. Mexican ancestry gained one place in the list and now exceeds English.

We also present a map of the 2000 data here. As we can see, German ancestry was leading in many counties in the North and some counties in the South. American and African American were most common in the southern counties, while English, French, Italian and Irish were more common in the Northeast. Mexican ancestry was the leader along the southwestern border of the United States.

Census 2000 Ancestry map

Since this was a Census 2000 special tabulation, reproducing this map exactly for ACS 2013 is impossible. We tried to follow the same guidelines as the previous authors and pulled the data on ancestry, African American and Hispanic or Latino origin separately to merge in one map. American Indian, Aleut and Eskimo ancestries were merged into a single group. We used a similar color-coding for convenience.

We will start reviewing changes from West to East. African American ancestry became the largest in some countries in Washington, which is one of the rare cases in the western half of United States. English ancestry around the state of Utah shrank slightly, while Mexican ancestry expanded on the border of Oregon and Idaho. The overall picture in the Midwest stayed almost the same - Native American, Finnish, Norwegian and Dutch majorities remained in their respective counties. In many Eastern counties where American ancestry was the largest, African American took its place. In Texas, Mexican ancestry is now the largest in most counties.

As in the previous tabulation, for the 2013 ACS we have some ancestries that were largest in only a few counties:

  • French Canadian in Androscoggin County, Maine and Cameron Parish, Louisiana
  • Polish in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania
  • Cuban in Miami-Dade County, Florida
  • Portuguese  Bristol County, Massachusetts and Bristol County, Rhode Island
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About Alexander Fishkov

Alexander Fishkov, Ph.D. student Computer Science

Alexander is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science. He currently holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Applied Math. He has experience working for industry major companies performing research in the fields of machine learning, data mining and natural language processing. In his free time, Alexander enjoys hiking, Nordic skiing and traveling.

Other posts by Alexander Fishkov:

One thought on “Ancestry map of the United States”

  1. Why is “American” distinct from “Native American”. ? It is unacceptable to class citizens who are just ignorant of their primary ethnicity as “American”. They can be broken down by skin-color and melded with other similar melanin-content ethnicities proportionally – with satisfactory accuracy results.

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