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Who's to say that all of those who have answered actually know what their ancestry is? You can't just go off your last name because in all reality it's only a very small part of your ancestry. I'm sure people from all over the US respond American, it's just that the Southerners don't see themselves as having ties to the old country because most of them don't anymore. I know I sure as hell don't. I could go back to Wales, Ireland, or England and not recognize a single damn thing other than similar names.
The question wasn't, "What's your ancestry?" It was, "What's your nationality?" If these people were born in the U.S. or are naturalized citizens, the correct answer to "What's your nationality?" the answer would be "American." If the OP meant to ask, "What's your ancestry?" that would be another matter entirely. To that particular question, my answer would be, "English, German, Belgian, French and Danish."
90% of the ones I've asked, they simply just don't know and reply "White" this is all they know. Is it lacking culture in these states? What is the cause of this identity confusion?
You hit on something perhaps at the root of the ugly political culture of the past couple of years. I hear terms like 'REAL AMERICAN'S' and "TRUE PATRIOTIC AMERICAN'S' and 'TAKING BACK AMERICA' used quite often in recent years and an apparent dislike for the 'socialist' Europeans in many of those same circles. Bottom line the only true American's in nationality are the natives who happened to be brown skinned, already here when Christopher Columbus, who came from Genoa, a port city on the Mediteranean not far from most of my relatives, set foot in the America's over 500 years ago or John Cabot, also Italian from the same town according to most reports, is believed to be the first since the Vikings who actually set foot in the current USA a few years later..Most voyages seemed to always be commissioned by Spain,Portugal or England. Without these initial explorations leading to many more in coming decades there might not be anything comparable to a southern culture or maybe even a white race in the USA today.
The question wasn't, "What's your ancestry?" It was, "What's your nationality?" If these people were born in the U.S. or are naturalized citizens, the correct answer to "What's your nationality?" the answer would be "American." If the OP meant to ask, "What's your ancestry?" that would be another matter entirely. To that particular question, my answer would be, "English, German, Belgian, French and Danish."
Right, but I'm pretty sure the OP meant Ancestry because anyone with American Citizenship is technically of American nationality.
Yes, but you state that your family is from the north. Don't you think it might have been different if your roots were southern and a battle had been fought on your territory? How many homes were destroyed, records lost during the war?
I have at least one ancestor whose record dead ends during that general period. Don't know whether to attribute that to lost records, or to go with the oral tradition that says he was a lonely sharecropper that took up with a woman from outside his own race and started a family. Fairly certain that if the family story is correct there wasn't any official written record of the fact, and certainly her ancestry wouldn't have been written in the family bible, if there was one.
Absolutely, and you raise some great points. I suspect, but obviously can't state with any certainty, that destruction of records on a large scale probably would have been more or less localized. If your family was from Atlanta or Columbia then your odds of retaining any physical record would have been slim of course. On a smaller scale, you could probably liken that to the destruction in places like San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle when their central cores burned.
I think the oral tradition has to be respected as a sort of evidence. People know where their parents came from, and where their parents' parents came from. When physical records don't exist, the oral record is all you can rely on. In that sense, I'd suspect that many families in the South would have retained some knowledge of their origin even if records vanished or never existed in the first place.
Last edited by DirtMagurt; 04-07-2011 at 03:24 AM..
when you ignore the matriarchal lines, you ignore 50% of your ancestry, not 1/128th.
If I began by ignoring my mother's ancestry? Sure. But I know hers, and her parents', and their parents'...
Quote:
if you only know back to your great-grand mother, then it is just wrong to say that you "know" your ancestry back to 1600. I can trace my last name back to 1400 something, but it tells me very little about who i am genetically or ethnically.
If great grandmother's parents came from Germany, or from a uniformly Dutch Reformed community full of generations of uniformly Dutch reformed people, then why is it wrong to assume her ancestors were probably Germans, or probably Dutch?
If I began by ignoring my mother's ancestry? Sure. But I know hers, and her parents', and their parents'...
If great grandmother's parents came from Germany, or from a uniformly Dutch Reformed community full of generations of uniformly Dutch reformed people, then why is it wrong to assume her ancestors were probably Germans, or probably Dutch?
well, here's a quote of yours from earlier in the thread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DirtMagurt
What a bizarre thread. Both sides of my family (Dutch and English) settled what is now New England long before 1700 and I can name individual members of each family back to that period. The Dutch side still maintains a family home built in the 1730s in New Paltz, in upstate New York.
New Paltz, NY was founded by french hueguenots. I know an older guy who went to go visit it for that reason. Plus it is in New York, not some bubble at the bottom of the ocean filled with Dutch people. Taking that into account, it seems wrong to ignore the majority of the females in the family and assume that they were German or Dutch.
New Paltz, NY was founded by french hueguenots. I know an older guy who went to go visit it for that reason. Plus it is in New York, not some bubble at the bottom of the ocean filled with Dutch people. Taking that into account, it seems wrong to ignore the majority of the females in the family and assume that they were German or Dutch.
I wasn't referring to that corner of the Dutch part of the family specifically in that post so I'm not sure what you're on about here. Those were just intended as examples. And I don't see why it matters whether or not that corner of the ancestry were patentees of New Paltz. They were settled into nearby Dutch villages prior to the founding of New Paltz, and married into the first generation of native offspring there. There are three Dutch families that go as far back in that community as any others, and New Paltz is closely tied to Kingston about five miles away, where the Dutch (and a couple of Huguenot) families had come from previously.
Just for the sake of clarification, the people that founded New Paltz were French speaking Walloons without exception, but several of them came from areas other than France, mostly Belgium/Netherlands and some from western parts of Germany, Westphalia and Baden-Württemberg.
What I was referring to in the other post is the ethnically and linguistically monolithic nature of a lot of the towns that people settled in certain places (not all of course), where it would be common for the second or third generation to be fluent speakers of Dutch or German and up until recent decades, didn't feature a whole lot of intermarrying between, say, Dutch Reformed and Irish Catholic families. That's still the case even today with concentrated populations of the Irish and Italian diasporas. Which not only leads one to some reasonable assumptions about ethnicity of individuals in ethnically homogenous places five or six generations back when records are unclear, but makes the gene pool appear a lot shallower than the math suggests is possible. Which is why pyramid theory doesn't work with small populations that are static for multiple generations. Diamond theory probably does a bit better job there. That's the difference between 32,000 possible ancestors and a few hundred to maybe a couple thousand at the outset in the initial settling of the colonies. Pyramid theory is absurd. If you follow it back to 750 A.D. you come up with some ridiculous number of ancestors like 300 trillion. There are estimates that 80% of all historical marriages have been between second cousins or closer. Not something you see much in Western culture anymore but it's still prevalent in other places. Generally, it's safer to assume that someone in your ancestry has married someone of similar ethnicity and genetic makeup than to assume they the didn't.
Last edited by DirtMagurt; 04-09-2011 at 01:18 AM..
Um, I'm from Texas (which I don't really consider the South but whatever) and I just see myself as American.
If you wanted to know my actual race it's Irish, Amerindian (from Mexico but Idk which tribe), French, German and Spanish. I never really refer to myself as white, mestizo or anything like that because I'm just an American. But I do embrace Mexican culture cuz I live on the border. That's about it.
And apparently the terms "white", "black", "hispanic" etc only exist in the U.S. We should get rid of those because everyone born here is American no matter their race.
Unless someone really wants to be referred to something else, we're all Americans. But then again I guess the U.S. is a melting pot.
The past racial climate of the south has to have something to do with it also. There was so much emphasis placed on the rights, privileges, etc... given and not given to whites and non-whites, that ethnicity kind of took a back seat to the simplified categorization of "White or Colored?"
The past racial climate of the south has to have something to do with it also. There was so much emphasis placed on the rights, privileges, etc... given and not given to whites and non-whites, that ethnicity kind of took a back seat to the simplified categorization of "White or Colored?"
I doubt that previous racial tension has anything to do with it. German American or Irish American or French American or English American etc... would be just as white (if not more white) than saying American. So no I disagree with you 100%. I consider myself an American and I would put that down on my nationality because my family has been in the states for a very long time. It has nothing to do with distinguishing myself apart from the blacks.
The South is the most integrated part of the country (and I would argue least racist).
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