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When was that taken from? Census 2000? You would never know there are Germans here. If anything Pittsburgh is Eastern European and Italian. Very few Irish as well. They have been moving out.
The peak of Irish American immigration was in the 1840s. The peak of German immigration was between the 1860s and 1880s. In contrast, large numbers of Eastern Europeans and Italians kept coming to America until immigration controls were put in place in the 1920s. So many older Italian-Americans are still probably second/third generation Americans, but virtually no Irish or German Americans.
Personally, I'm somewhat of an anomaly, because my most recent immigrant ancestors were (ethnic) Germans from a small town in what is now Romania who immigrated to the U.S. just prior to WW1. All of my Irish ancestors came over in the 1840s though, so any family memory of the "old country" was distant even in my grandfather's time.
Having lived in the Upper Midwest for a decade, I know of several towns--Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin comes to mind first--that are full of German Americans but adapted another ethnic identity during WWII. Mt. Horeb,for instance, pretends to be Norwegian and the town is decorated with trolls. I'm not saying Bluecarebear is incorrect, but I'm skeptical of just how Swiss that West Virginia town really is.
Also the word German in German is Deutsche, which sounds very similar to Dutch. This is why the "Pennsylvania Dutch" are not Dutch at all. I have an ex who thought he was Dutch until he looked into his family history after his grandmother passed to find that he was, in fact, German.
Personally, my dad's side of the family is from Canada (mostly Arcadian), yet I have one ancestor who immigrated from Hamburg, Germany to Moncton, New Brunswick in the 19th Century and changed his surname from Schmidt to Smith. While this means my family's background is 1/64th German--so small it's not worth mentioning--I had no idea I was of any German extraction at all until a couple years ago.
I'm sure we could debate whether American culture more influenced by Germany or Britain to no end, and frankly that conversation doesn't really excite me. But the dominance of German culture in the US is one of many reasons why rural New England feels nothing like rural Pennsylvania, or why rural Arkansas is so different from rural Missouri, or why there's such a cultural contrast between Louisville and the rest of Kentucky.
Not sure if they're "pretending" to be Norwegian. Granted, their white population is 33 percent German, but it is also 23 percent Norwegian. It may not be as prominent, but the presence is certainly there.
What's interesting to me is that Minneapolis-St. Paul has such as high % of German ancestry, even though they're thought of as more Scandinavian (especially Minneapolis).
My guess is that the growth of MSP in recent decades may have changed this: I guess a lot of people from the Upper Midwest have moved there?
What's interesting to me is that Minneapolis-St. Paul has such as high % of German ancestry, even though they're thought of as more Scandinavian (especially Minneapolis).
My guess is that the growth of MSP in recent decades may have changed this: I guess a lot of people from the Upper Midwest have moved there?
For one thing, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark are much smaller than Germany, so their immigration numbers may have been "altered". MSP has been thought to be Scandinavian largely because no other region in America attracted any significant numbers of Scandinavians ( I'm including the Dakotas and Wisconsin with MSP here). The German-American presence has always been strong throughout the Midwest, but especially in its northern sections--just take virtually the entire neighboring state of Wisconsin.
My own German immigrant ancesters went to Nebraska, and some spread from there to both Wisconsin and Minnesota..
What's interesting to me is that Minneapolis-St. Paul has such as high % of German ancestry, even though they're thought of as more Scandinavian (especially Minneapolis).
My guess is that the growth of MSP in recent decades may have changed this: I guess a lot of people from the Upper Midwest have moved there?
As we were discussing earlier, Pittsburgh is thought to be a Slovak/Polish city, where as a plurality of the whites there are actually German American.
Likewise, German Americans make up a plurality of non-Hispanic white Chicagoans too, yet the city is stereotyped to be a Polish/Irish town.
Fact is in the United States, outside the South, German American = the norm. Minneapolis is known to be Scandinavian because that's how it deviates from that norm.
Fact is in the United States, outside the South, German American = the norm. Minneapolis is known to be Scandinavian because that's how it deviates from that norm.
German-American is only the norm in Pennsylvania and the Midwest.
Growing up in New England, I was one of the only people I knew with a German surname who wasn't Jewish.
You're forgetting that the English had a massive head start.
In 1900, about half of white Americans were of colonial stock and the other half were of post-1800 immigrant stock. 8 million were of German birth or parentage, if we add in the third generation, Volga Germans and those of colonial German descent it couldn't have been higher than 15 million.
Considering that there were more than 30 million Americans who could trace their roots to colonial times, that's 15 million right there. Plus the descendants of Canadians, English immigrants etc.
There were 50 million Americans reporting English ancestry in 1980 - and today it's only 30 million or so? How can that be?
Amish/Hutterites represent about 1% of German Americans. They represent a much smaller percentage of the German ancestry population than Hasidic Jews represent of the Jewish population.
At best English alone and German may be about the same, but it's not true that there German ancestry is "far more numerous" than English ancestry.
With more than five million German immigrants being processed between 1840 and 1900, your number of 8 million is undeniably short. Do you think those Germans only have 1.5 kids a piece or something? They were actually averaging around 6-7!
Regarding the ancestry reporting, you do know of the anti German sentiment that existed in America during the mid 20th century, don't you? people of German/Irish/English ancestry would want to hide their German ancestry, or lie it away entirely, even as late as the 1980s because of the world wars. I wasn't born then, but I wonder how my own relatives in Louisville, KY answered the 1980 census, given that they were half German descended, with other ancestry going back to the UK, but the German ancestry was much more recent. I wonder this too because their grandparents, who answered the 1920 census, lied entirely about their's and their parents birth country.
Another sad part of Americas German identity is the loss of surnames due to Anglicizing (mostly because the English language doesn't have umlauts, and German surnames are full of them, and to avoid discrimination) or by women choosing spouses with non-German names to avoid discrimination following the world wars.
I do genealogy as a hobby, and have researched stuff like this for hundreds of hours on end, detailing each individual state's migration trends going back centuries. Absolutely, no way, does English outnumber the German in America today. Not by blood at least. I would even tell those Americans who think they don't have German ancestry to look harder, because you will probably find a large amount of it going back far enough.
As we were discussing earlier, Pittsburgh is thought to be a Slovak/Polish city, where as a plurality of the whites there are actually German American.
Likewise, German Americans make up a plurality of non-Hispanic white Chicagoans too, yet the city is stereotyped to be a Polish/Irish town.
Fact is in the United States, outside the South, German American = the norm. Minneapolis is known to be Scandinavian because that's how it deviates from that norm.
It's not that common in New England , although changing somewhat because of internal migration, and it's not that common in some western states, including the Pacific coast. People of the British Isles probably still outnumber those of German ancestry, because of the head start they had, and because of places like the South...
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