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This remind me Chuck Norris who always said he's Irish and Native American but after some research about his ancestry, we found out he is mostly English with small amount of Scottish, Welsh and German. It's like everyone wants to be a little bit Native American, don't know why
It helps their argument when they tell "foreigners" to go back where they came from. They use the "Native American" trump card when the person reminds them that their ancestors immigrated to this country. They respond by telling them they are part Native American.
LOL we had those "Indian myths" in our family too. I took a DNA test and it came back 100 percent European, with about 80 percent of that being northern European. Turned out I am the whitest person I know.
Maybe if “Mixed British” or just “British” were a category
My family have been here for 350+ years. I have English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and Scotch-Irish ancestry, plus 1/32 each of Cherokee, Choctaw, and German. But even knowing that, I can’t say for sure that my ancestors weren’t mixed even before they got here. I have ancestors from Shropshire, which is on the border with Wales, and with all of the jobs in mining in Shropshire during the late medieval/early modern era, were there Welsh migrants among my ancestors? I have ancestors who were Protestants in Donegal in the 1690’s, so I presume they were Scotch-Irish, but did they intermarry with Catholics? Were they even Ulster Scots at all, or maybe they converted under English pressure. I have ancestors from Cornwall. Did they think of themselves as English or Cornish? My 1/32 German is well-documented because Lutheran and Moravian churches kept good records, but some of my German ancestors were from Bohemia. Were they purely German, or a German/Czech mix?
I found out most of my ancestry doing research on my own. I knew the names of my grandparents’ grandparents, and what towns or at least counties and what states they lived in, but not much else. None of my grandparents knew their ethnic heritage beyond rudimentary notions—McKelvey and McKinnon are Scottish names, Evans is Welsh, my grandfather’s great-grandmother was a Cherkee adopted by whites in Tennessee in the 1830’s. Even the German part was obscured because my ancestors had anglified the names more than 200 years ago—Schmetter became Smathers, Schneider became Snyder, and Volprecht became Fulbright.
Somebody early on in this discussion said he or she could only trace family back to the late 1800’s. That is too bad. For all branches of my family, I found that once you get back to 1850 or so, you share ancestors with so many other people that somebody else has likely already done the research for you, usually including copies of birth/death/marriage certificates, census records, and church records.
The most recent immigrant in my family arrived from Scotland in 1795. I think that is fairly typical for Southerners, especially in rural areas which were largely bypassed by the waves of German, Catholic Irish, and Jewish immigration later in the 19th and 20th Centuries. I know my ancestry now to a pretty clear extent dating Bach to the 1600’s, but it’s such a muddle that “American” seems appropriate for the census form. If there were a category called something like “mixed British heritage”, I might choose that instead, since it accounts for 29/32 of my ancestry. Southerners don’t know or relate to the countries of our ancestors because they came so long ago.
To be American is not akin to being a mutt. We're from America, as were our parents.
The British Isles were conquered by the Roman empire. Do you think many Brits claim to be Italian?
No, but for centuries they prided themselves on Anglo-Saxon blood or Norman blood or even Celtic blood. At least there, there were simply a few major population transfers over several centuries so you could likely trace much of your lineage back if you so desired. America has had major population transfers for pretty much its entire existence as a country. I think we might have been at a third English heritage at the time of the Revolutionary War. I’d go crazy trying to get my Mexican grandfather and my English grandmother to agree which could claim me, let alone the wildcard Puerto Rican blood or the Scotch-Irish side. Trying to find a common strand in such a blender is usually a fool’s errand for 95% of us born here. And what would be the point? Teddy already told us what to do with the hyphenated Americans. So I’m American, both by choice and necessity.
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.
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Maybe if “Mixed British” or just “British” were a category
