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There are many people that are surprised when they really do a proper ancestry search.
My grandmother for one. Her husband was named Dimmit so he in her opinion was French. Actually he was a descendent of Peter De Mitt who was Dutch, and when he came to this country, the recorder of his arrival changed it to Dimmit and all Dimmit's are from that one ancestor and he was Dutch.
My grandmother was herself a Post so she had to be English coming down from the Executive Officer at Ft in Colonies, named Post Actually he was a Dutch immigrant named Van Der Post that dropped the Van Der when he joined the English Army. And his wife was Dutch.
Kind of angered my grandmother to be shown what she had thought was facts for nearly 70 years at the time, when she was shown the truth.
More often than not, myths and misinformation like this only appear in families that have been in the US for 200+ years. Without any living ties, people start making up myths and lies to explain the past. My family has been that way. We've been here so long we've forgotten where exactly we came from.
Before I started tracing my tree, I was always under the impression that my grandmother's family was British. (Her maiden name was Partney, so it sounded reasonable enough.) A few weeks into my tree I actually learned her family was French--and not British at all. About 200 years ago the family began to corrupt their French surname. "Partenais" morphed into "Partney."
Covid-19 derailed some of my genealogy plans this year. I'm bummed. My grandmother's French family was from an area of Missouri that was settled by them and a small group of settlers in 1720--exactly 300 years ago this year. The area historical society was planning to host a huge tricentennial event to commerate the first settlement. Covid-19 killed the whole celebration.
All I know about my mom's side is her parents came here in 1919,1920 meet on the boat coming from Hungary and were married in 1920 in Buffalo ,NY.Her mother's people the Beloghs were wealthy presbyterians from Budapest and her father's people, the Popps raised horses. That is about it.
Dad's side is german and a little different.My grandmother's first cousin Reinhold von Lilienschild had been an artillary officer during WW! and was also a mechanic engineer and metallurgist. He also was part owner of a department store in Berlin. Some one reported him to the nazis as being a jew. According to records the gestapo consulted, there was no jewish blood.The family had fought in the crusades in the Holy Land, and later took part in the baltic Crusades to convert the pagan tribes of the region.They went back in the records of the City of Riga to the 12th to 14th century, somewhere around that time.Some members had belonged to the Livonian Knights of the Sword, who later became part of the Teutonic Knights. Had to flee to America because the Gestapo was going to arrest him anyways. Now her family the Steldts came from Pomerenia and and some point to Riga.But I found there is a dutch shipping company named Van Der Steldt. So maybe they were originally dutch. Grandpa's side, well the cousins in Nuremberg keep the family history book, and discovered that in the State Archives, in Hamburg, is a history of the Hilpert family. Now my dad when he did a TDY in the late 1950s never got to Nuremberg, but he did get to Garmisch. Looked up parish records, and one of the family was a burgermeister and had also been a steward to the Grand Duke of Bavaria, back in the 1690s. The family were landowners, petty court officals, and military men including two generals, so much of what my dad learned jiebied with what he was told by his father. Was told by my great aunts that some of the family ladies were School Sisters of Notre Dame and Sisters of charity
All I know about my mom's side is her parents came here in 1919,1920 meet on the boat coming from Hungary and were married in 1920 in Buffalo ,NY.Her mother's people the Beloghs were wealthy presbyterians from Budapest and her father's people, the Popps raised horses. That is about it.
Dad's side is german and a little different.My grandmother's first cousin Reinhold von Lilienschild had been an artillary officer during WW! and was also a mechanic engineer and metallurgist. He also was part owner of a department store in Berlin. Some one reported him to the nazis as being a jew. According to records the gestapo consulted, there was no jewish blood.The family had fought in the crusades in the Holy Land, and later took part in the baltic Crusades to convert the pagan tribes of the region.They went back in the records of the City of Riga to the 12th to 14th century, somewhere around that time.Some members had belonged to the Livonian Knights of the Sword, who later became part of the Teutonic Knights. Had to flee to America because the Gestapo was going to arrest him anyways. Now her family the Steldts came from Pomerenia and and some point to Riga.But I found there is a dutch shipping company named Van Der Steldt. So maybe they were originally dutch. Grandpa's side, well the cousins in Nuremberg keep the family history book, and discovered that in the State Archives, in Hamburg, is a history of the Hilpert family. Now my dad when he did a TDY in the late 1950s never got to Nuremberg, but he did get to Garmisch. Looked up parish records, and one of the family was a burgermeister and had also been a steward to the Grand Duke of Bavaria, back in the 1690s. The family were landowners, petty court officals, and military men including two generals, so much of what my dad learned jiebied with what he was told by his father. Was told by my great aunts that some of the family ladies were School Sisters of Notre Dame and Sisters of charity
I believe I have a DNA match that's a Popps or Papps. Have you done DNA? If not, you should buy a test at Ancestry then upload to My Heritage, it's free. You may end up finding some relatives in other countries.
One of my Hungarian matches on my dad's side said that it's expensive to buy Ancestry tests; they don't have sales over there. I told her next sale that I can have it shipped to me then I'll ship it to them. I'd love that cousin to be at Ancestry to see who matches on my dad's mothers side. She told me that buying from My heritage was cheaper for people in Europe.
My son's 2nd great grandfather comes from an English line that settled in Trenton NJ, they not only recycled the same names (George, William, Thomas) but they were born in similar years. Took me a good year to sort the cousins from my son's line. What a genealogical mess!
I'm thankful my parents were immigrants from Hungary, so no "Indian princess" stories for me. My mothers fathers brothers were a colorful bunch that came to the US. I never even knew of them until DNA. They were the perfect line for passing down stories that wouldn't need to be embellished. One brother tried to kill the other brother's wife because she had chronic pain. He blinded her instead. He went into a mental hospital, his body was donated to science and we don't know where it is. The blind wife's husband died of cancer a few years later; I think he was the only normal one. Another shot his son in law, supposedly in self defense, he then committed suicide in his 70's.
Don't feel bad, you and probably half the people in the US think they're Irish, especially on St Patty's Day!
Our experience was the opposite! My younger sister and I both married and divorced men of Irish descent, and the marriages weren't good because of alcoholism (not all Irishmen are alcoholics, of course, but the stereotype is there). So, we used to laugh and say we were glad we weren't Irish.
Until we found out that Great-great-Grandma Mary was born in Dublin. Oops. My DNA shows me at 2% Irish.
No Indian princess story in my family, either. We know exactly who came when and on what ships. (From England and the Netherlands), except for one line that traces back to colonial New England that we never knew about until my sister started doing the genealogy.
But we did have a story that we took for granted was true, and it wasn't. I never knew my paternal grandfather, who died five years before I was born, but his sister was born in 1900 and died in 2000, a few months short of 100. Always had a sharp mind. In the 1990s, we asked her if she knew when that side of the family (which is our last name) came here.
She told us that they came from Manchester (which was true) and that my great-greats had come to Hartford, CT, as a young couple with an infant son. The mother died not long after, the father remarried, and the new stepmother didn't like the boy so an uncle came and got him and brought him to live with them in Paterson, NJ.
But it's not true. My great-greats worked in the cotton mills in Manchester, and during the Civil War, the Yankees were blocking southern cotton from getting to England, and the mills were closing. They knew there was work to be had in the silk mills in Paterson, known then as "Silk City", so they packed up their infant son and moved to New Jersey in 1863.
There was no Connecticut, no death of the mother, no stepmother, no uncle relocating a kid. They just stayed in Paterson, and eventually my grandparents met while working in the silk mills and moved to my grandmother's hometown a few miles from Paterson, which eventually became my own hometown.
Have no idea where Great-Aunt Alice's tale came from.
Sometimes family stories are just wrong, but sometimes the genetic heritage just isn't a perfect match for the cultural heritage. Throw in a few ancestors who were adopted without documentation, or whose biological father wasn't the father of record that raised them, and you can end up with genes from pretty much anywhere in the world. Also, Americans tend to think of their people as being the ethnicity of the country their ancestors emigrated from, but just because Great-Grandpa and Great-Grandma are from, say, Ireland doesn't mean their grandparents were, and one's DNA results would reflect that even if the great-grandparents were thoroughly assimilated Irish.
This is true! When looking into the history of the area where I grew up (not my own ancestry, but the early Dutch settlers of Bergen County, NJ) you see this name Zabriskie everywhere. The Zabriskies were a prominent Dutch family who owned a lot of land in NW Bergen County. There are numerous preserved Zabriskie houses, a Zabriskie pond, a Zabriskie this, a Zabriskie that.
But the guy from whom this name comes down was a Prussian named Zaborowsky who came over on a Dutch ship in the 17th century and married into a Dutch family and lived among the Dutch settlers. Eventually the family likely became more Dutch than not because that was the main demographic in the area, but even then, it's no guarantee they were all actually Dutch. Some of my own family came here from the Netherlands with Spanish and French surnames, and my mother's DNA showed 3% Iberian peninsula. People have been moving around forever. War, religious persecution, poverty, disease, or just a sense of adventure kept people from staying in the same place, except for maybe Iceland.
A family story on my mother’s side had our ancestors from NY State being Dutch. Sis did our genealogy, and discovered we were German, from the Palatinate.
Before Germany became a single country in the 1870s, it was very common in America to refer to all German and Netherlandish/Flemish people as "Dutch" especially since in the local dialects of many parts of Germany and all the way down into Switzerland people identified their language as Dütsch, Düütsch, Deutsch, Dietch, Duitsk, Duits, etc. all sounding pretty much like the word 'Dutch'.
Many old-time Americans with the nickname 'Dutch', even right into the 20th century, were of German ancestry, not Netherlandish!
And the Dutch and Germans are closely related people. Not only were the low countries part of the HRE since the early Middle Ages, it is really only an accident of history that the Netherlands is its own country and say, Bavaria, Saxony, or Schlesvig, are part of Germany. It could have been the other way around.
The Netherlands was not any further from the cultural paradigm of other West Germanic (lingistically) speakers on the edges of the 'sphere' of greater "Germany" such as Schwabians, Bavarians, Bohemians, Thuringians, etc. except by the institution of a centralized effort at nation building/national identity superceding local identities, and an enforced linguistic conformity (the advancement of High German as the national language) during the German Confederation and Empire periods.
So in short, not too weird for a person with pre-19th and 20th century German roots in America to be told their families called themselves 'Dutch' leading to the incorrect notion that their ancestors came from the Netherlands. Especially if your family comes from New York or parts of the Mid-Atlantic which had a healthy mix of Netherlandish and German immigrants.
Before Germany became a single country in the 1870s, it was very common in America to refer to all German and Netherlandish/Flemish people as "Dutch" especially since in the local dialects of many parts of Germany and all the way down into Switzerland people identified their language as Dütsch, Düütsch, Deutsch, Dietch, Duitsk, Duits, etc. all sounding pretty much like the word 'Dutch'.
Many old-time Americans with the nickname 'Dutch', even right into the 20th century, were of German ancestry, not Netherlandish!
And the Dutch and Germans are closely related people. Not only were the low countries part of the HRE since the early Middle Ages, it is really only an accident of history that the Netherlands is its own country and say, Bavaria, Saxony, or Schlesvig, are part of Germany. It could have been the other way around.
The Netherlands was not any further from the cultural paradigm of other West Germanic (lingistically) speakers on the edges of the 'sphere' of greater "Germany" such as Schwabians, Bavarians, Bohemians, Thuringians, etc. except by the institution of a centralized effort at nation building/national identity superceding local identities, and an enforced linguistic conformity (the advancement of High German as the national language) during the German Confederation and Empire periods.
So in short, not too weird for a person with pre-19th and 20th century German roots in America to be told their families called themselves 'Dutch' leading to the incorrect notion that their ancestors came from the Netherlands. Especially if your family comes from New York or parts of the Mid-Atlantic which had a healthy mix of Netherlandish and German immigrants.
The Dutch in northern New Jersey, much of New York along the Hudson, and of course, the founders of New York City itself, came from the Netherlands.
I think it's more important where you are going than where you came from.
Oh gosh, that's what one of my lines thought. They apparently had a saying or were told never look back. I get that things were bad in the old country and they were excited with their new life. But, I sure would like some idea about which region of Scotland that group came from. From census records and the like, it appears they came in 1790. No ship records, no court records, at least not on this side of the pond. Yeah, I've got them narrowed down to about eleven families in North Carolina to Tennessee lol. I've traced neighbors for all of them, you name it, no luck. When they arrived they were dirt poor, that doesn't help.
Roselvr, haven't tried to do the Ancestry DNA tests yet. I might look into that. Now on my grandparents marriage certificate from Buffalo, Ny, it list my grandfather's name as Joseph Popp, and in then in parenthese has Pape. Which is the Hungarian spelling.There is the Pape family out in Seguin who have pecan orchards, but don't know if we are kin.That's where the DNA tests might be handy. We are distantly related to Otto Koehler, who founded the Pearl brewery in San Antonio.I guess that's through Fred Koehler, my Tanta Tina's husband. If the tests aren't too expensive, may do it.
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My DNA shows me at 2% Irish. 
