Foreign ancestors- origins- roots in the forum! :) (neighborhood, bars)
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omg so true. Everybody from the island of ireland is fed up of plastic irish in america.
It gets really annoying when we go visit and we hear 'oh my ggggg granny's doggy is irish'.
Well, you just be sure you tell all your friends and relatives that you visit when you come to America JUST how irritated this makes you. Be sure and let us know what their reaction is! I bet the most common one will be this: followed by this: followed by this:
Honestly, some people just don't seem to get it. Most Americans who embrace their ancestry aren't doing so because they're searching for their identity that they feel they're shorted on by being simply American, or trying to be cooler than "just an American mutt," or whatever other twisted ideas some people seem to have. Most Americans who know their family's history and ancestry, even if it's just a generation or two back, find it interesting because of the stories, the adventure, the history of those ancestors. For instance, I think it is SO COOL that one of my ancestors was a French Huguenot who escaped France to England and then went from England to the New World and was the earliest settler in America who was a direct ancestor of George Washington!
That's a cool story, full of adventure and bravery and excitement, and it thrills me to think that the same blood flows through my veins as well, the same DNA. Trust me when I say, I don't give a fig if my interest in that irritates either the English or the French!
I'm just as interested in the Germans who left Germany even earlier, in the 1600s, to move from a very organized society to the wilds of the New World. Actually, they left during the Thirty Years War, and this makes me very curious because the first permanent German settlement in the New World wasn't till the 1680s - so that makes their immigration and the situation around it even more interesting. Not only did they leave their homeland (which was in chaos), they didn't even settle with other Germans - they settled in a completely foreign colony among the British. Talk about bravery and fortitude! Anyone who moved to the New World in the 1640s had a rough time ahead of them - I can only imagine how much more difficult it was to be German in an English colony. Were they Catholic? Protestant? What's interesting is that prior to their flight to the New World, they were practicing Catholics. Did they continue in that faith in the midst of a British colony in the New World? We don't know. And we don't care if Germans think we're weird or are irritated when we go to Germany and see our family name on the sides of buildings, or find graves that are 400 years old with that same name carved on them, and we say, "These are our people!" (We know the exact town they came from so that was helpful in tracing them - a small town just north of Munich.)
Last edited by KathrynAragon; 09-03-2013 at 04:47 PM..
Stop telling me you live in america. I already know.
My point is I live here, I can tell what it's like here more than you.
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Originally Posted by Mac15
It isn't like that.
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Originally Posted by Mac15
The way Americans do it is by their surname. It doesn't matter if they have mostly Scottish ancestry, if their surname is English they will say they are English.
It's also annoying how Anglo Australians are seen as just Australian, while even a Chinese Australian who's been here for 5 generations is seen as a 'Chinese-Australian.'
I have never heard people in Australia describe themselves as Anglo, Italian, Yugoslav Australians.
Considering that the UK is a melting pot too (apparently "anyone" can be British!), I thought I'd look up some ways that the British identify these different ethnic groups.
I could go on, but you get the picture, right? I mean, how are these designations, which are often embraced by the individuals of such groups themselves, any different from someone in the US calling themselves Irish American if their family comes from Ireland, or Italian American if their family comes from Italy?
I encourage this embracing of one's cultural heritage - I think it's lovely.
Considering that the UK is a melting pot too (apparently "anyone" can be British!), I thought I'd look up some ways that the British identify these different ethnic groups.
I could go on, but you get the picture, right? I mean, how are these designations, which are often embraced by the individuals of such groups themselves, any different from someone in the US calling themselves Irish American if their family comes from Ireland, or Italian American if their family comes from Italy?
I encourage this embracing of one's cultural heritage - I think it's lovely.
To be honest with you Kathryn most Britain's don't refer to their ethnic background unless they are asked to on a form - black Britain's for example never refer to themselves as African British or Caribbean British but just British, the same can be said of British people with Irish ancestry or Italian etc
To be honest with you Kathryn most Britain's don't refer to their ethnic background unless they are asked to on a form - black Britain's for example never refer to themselves as African British or Caribbean British but just British, the same can be said of British people with Irish ancestry or Italian etc
That's interesting, thanks for the insight.
That being said, do they embrace their cultural heritages, generally speaking? Foods, holidays, traditions, etc? Those that differ from traditionally British traditions, foods, etc? I am not asking if they SHUN British traditions, but do you often see people from the various ethnic groups (which they are asked to identify themselves with on official British forms) keeping those traditions alive though their family and many of their ancestors live in the UK?
I hope so. It seems that they do.
For the record, most Americans identify themselves as American when asked - not Irish American, or German American, whatever - unless the topic of ancestry comes up. I would just bet that if a Briton of, say, Sudanese ancestry went to the Sudan, they'd possibly identify themselves to the locals as a Briton with Sudanese ancestry. That's really no different from an American going to Scotland and identifying themselves as an American with Scottish ancestry.
The exception to that general rule is African Americans - and that is a fairly recent development, pushed by the media incessantly. In fact, lots of African Americans don't self identify that way themselves.
The average American doesn't walk around saying, "I'm German American" out of context, even though German ancestry is extremely common in the US (the most common ancestry in the US - at least 50 million Americans are of German descent).
Considering that the UK is a melting pot too (apparently "anyone" can be British!), I thought I'd look up some ways that the British identify these different ethnic groups.
I could go on, but you get the picture, right? I mean, how are these designations, which are often embraced by the individuals of such groups themselves, any different from someone in the US calling themselves Irish American if their family comes from Ireland, or Italian American if their family comes from Italy?
I encourage this embracing of one's cultural heritage - I think it's lovely.
The difference is that these are recent immigrants, they haven't lived in Britain for centuries. You won't find people whose great-great-great-grandparents immigrated to Britain from France still refer to themselves as "French-British".
The kind of cultural traditions that Americans cling to are usually outdated stereotypes and barely practiced (or practiced differently) in the European countries themselves.
true, most Americans with English or German or other european names really have no connection to that name, especially if they say they have been here since colonial times , there would be so much mixing that it would be impossible to know their family heritage or have any connection to their last name
and a woman's last name after she marries has no meaning especially if she's also from a mixed family with no real connection to where they came from
I remember kids in school use to tell me they are Scotch, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, etc, etc
the mix was so high that it's really of no meaning anymore, some people just say they are a Heinz 57 mix
It's funny, I get the feeling in the US race matters over ethnicity/nationality, so people don't see these white people as hybrids, just as 'white people.'
I could go on, but you get the picture, right? I mean, how are these designations, which are often embraced by the individuals of such groups themselves, any different from someone in the US calling themselves Irish American if their family comes from Ireland, or Italian American if their family comes from Italy?
The difference is all of the British groups arrived relatively recently, most are first or second generation immigrants. Besides appearance, they are also somewhat culturally distinct from typical "native" British. Most American whites have ancestry further back and these days, cultural differences from ancestry are minor.
For example, there's Irish American and Irish American. Woodlawn, Bronx is an Irish American neighborhood in a different sense — it has a large population of recent Irish immigrants. The culture of the place would be different from usual white American neighborhood or white "Irish-American" neighborhoods. Some traditions may be preserved, for example, I knew someone my parent's age (Irish-American ?) who went to, and practiced music at, Irish-American bars where they played traditional Irish music. Still culturally, today, most Irish-Americans are really nearly indistinguishable from white Americans in general. I doubt any Irish person would find much about the habits of Irish-Americans as "Irish", they'd just seem American. Ditto with Germans and German-Americans, etc. maybe a little less so for Italian-Americans as they tend to be a bit more recent. The roots have been lost.
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followed by this: 
followed by this: 
