Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
That excellent map shows that most white Southerners, unlike other Americans, chose "American" as their ancestry when they filled out the 2000 census. Obviously, they were from somewhere else: I'm guessing Scotland is one of the most common countries of origin for those with roots in the South. Did they choose American because...
1) Their family has been here so long...
2) It's more patriotic
or
3) Some other reason?
I'd be interested to know, especially if real, live Southerners here have anything to say.
Perhaps because once you get past three generations, and unless your family lives its existence within a rigid ethnically-defined caste, ancestry is a rather stupid question. For example, I'm part English, part German, part Scot, part Irish, part French Huguenot, and part Cherokee Indian. I mean Southerners and American Indians have intermarried for generations. Which one do I choose?
One of my lifelong friends is Indian (Asian). She married a white guy and had two kids. What do their kids put on their respective census forms? One of those two boys recently married a white girl. The resulting child of that marriage will only be one-fourth Indian. Again, what makes it on the census form or her grandchild in another twenty years?
Need empirical proof? One of the interesting ongoing narratives right now entails people sending in a sample of their DNA and being floored by their resulting genetic provenance.
In other words, the United States is basically a grabbag of genetics and cultures from all over the world. So unless you live in some enclave such as Northern Minnesota that is almost exclusively Scandinavian, you or your progeny will likely intermarry with someone with ultimately a different country of origin for his her bloodline.
Remember that immigration was not as big in the South after a certain period. Except for odd cases like New Orleans, most Southerners moved West from the original 13 colonies. By the time that most got into Tennessee, Kentucky and more of the western states of the south (and the state of records in 19th Century America), alot prob. forgot what exact country they were originally from. For instance, my ancestors settled parts of West Virginia (not deep South, but i'll use it anyway). The first broke the Proclimation line and settled west of the Appalachians in the 1740's after immigrating in the 1720's. His children may have known that is was Scotchi-Irishish, but may or may not have known that he was from Northern Ireland (we actually still can't find out). Over a couple generations, that information is lost. Also important, the interior South was more rural than any part of America today. You lived by a few people a few miles down a dirt mountain road. Unlike New York or Boston then, there weren't neighborhoods of Irish, Italian, Eastern European, Martians. It makes it harder to preserve cultural identity. (Here I go on a total rant. Man named Alan Lomax traveled the world recording vvarious folk musics, especially in the South. He later took these recordings and analzyed them based on form, culture, et. cetera. Listen to some Bluegrass, Appalachian or Rockabilly type musics. In some, you will hear a distinct Gaelic influence. It isn't a coincidence.)
I never understood how people don't know where there ancestors come from. How does this happen. Wouldn't each generation pass this information on? How does it get lost?
This is an answer to an old post because I am just now reading this thread but for anyone still interested maybe the OP is still following, my family for one can only be traced back to one generation on one side in Eastern Europe due to the only survivors of Tzarist persecution and then the Holocaust when entire generations were wiped out.
I like a lot of these recent responses. As others have said, most of us are a mix. Does the Census care what mix I am? Does it matter that I have, probably, seven or eight different countries of origin? We have lived here for generations...I consider myself an American. AND, I don't live in the South.
Look, my family has lived in what is now the southern US since the 1640s. The vast majority of my ancestors (all I know about anyway) moved from England and Scotland and Germany in the 1600s. My ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War and were members of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg. One of my ancestors was the city planner for Yorktown, VA. Ancestors also fought in the Civil War, WW1, WW2, Korea, and Vietnam and my living family members also fought as Americans in the Persian Gulf. I have family members deployed now to that region in fact.
Meanwhile, my best friend's family came to the US in the early 1900s from Italy - through Ellis Island. Her grandmother never really learned English and her parents were bilingual. So she is a second generation American whose family lived and raised her in an Italian neighborhood in New York, with tales of Italian relatives still back in Sicily. None of her ancestors have ever served in the US military. She identifies as Italian American. She is 100 percent Italian and grew up surrounded by Italian influence, language, food, music, and culture.
It would be ridiculous for this southern girl to claim to be British, or Scottish, or German, or French, or Scandinavian, or Finnish - though I have DNA from all those regions of Europe. I'm American and proud of it.
Great story. But they're not asking if you are British, or Scottish, or German, or French. They're asking what your ancestry is.
Location: Appalachian New York, Formerly Louisiana
4,409 posts, read 6,543,919 times
Reputation: 6253
I think there's a cultural element too. In the south people are less divided by every detail as compared to the north, where a lot of us are hung up on who is what and from where and how (not always in a negative way, mind; sometimes just out of curiosity and small talk).
For example, town to town rivalry is a northern thing, I saw none of it in Louisiana.
However, black/white generally matters more in the south for sure.
Great story. But they're not asking if you are British, or Scottish, or German, or French. They're asking what your ancestry is.
Well, I couldn't choose just one. That's my point. And my husband, whose ancestors hail from Louisiana, is such a mixed bag of DNA there is no way he could choose just one or even just two "types" of ancestry.
Besides that, both of our families have been in the southern US for several hundred years so the whole "what ancestry are you" question is sort of moot. Most people don't really know their ancestry back more than three or four generations even if they are claiming to be of, for example, Italian or Scottish or whatever ancestry.
You know what we are? Louisianian and Texan and if you want to go WAY back, we are Virginian and South Carolinian.
Do you think that the Northeast received different ethnic groups of Europeans (Italian, Irish, English etc.) that stayed segregated while the South (at least the whites) intergrated and interbred among cultures so much that it was hard to distinguish ancestry?
Most of the South didn't receive many immigrants until the 20th century. One big exception is South Louisiana where there is the French history and heavy 1800s immigration by Italians, Irish, Germans and some Polish and people here do claim those ancestries.
I just answer Southern American. That goes back to the Civil War and I’m not interested in going any further.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
