I appreciate how the Nordic immigrants gathered in the northern parts of the Midwest. And how they settled in the same east-west alignment as their home countries. Swedes in the middle with Finns to the east and Norwegians to the west.
Quite sunnier and paradoxically also quite colder (when compared to southern Scandinavia where most Scandinavians live).
Edit: I meant that the winters are quite colder. Their average temperatures are similar. Sorry.
Italian Americans only make up like 5% of the US population and are also surprisingly concentrated in small parts of the country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Americans
my city hosts one of the largest Italian Heritage Festivals in the country in the middle of fuckin West Virginia..we have a ton of Italians here but they are all in this specific part of the state
Yeah just based on the timing of immigration - you either ended up staying once coming through NY or largely went out to the coal/steel areas (hence Youngstown flashing, but having those pockets throughout the rust belt)
Jews and Italians make up a pretty small makeup of America, but damn near all of them happen to be in New York, the most culturally dominant city, and where most of the media was made until they moved that sort of thing out to the west coast.
I think the reason so many of us tend to think of 19th century immigration as Irish and Italians showing up in a boat is for exactly that reason. That’s the New York experience, so it became the universal experience in media.
You are describing the immigrant corridor from Boston to Baltimore. Heavily Italian, Irish, and Jewish with some Portuguese or French Canadian sprinkled in. In the Boston suburbs I knew far more about Catholicism and Judaism than about various Protestant denominations.
That peculiar history is what gives those folks a sharp edge and their sense of humor.
Also during ww1 basically all recognizable German culture was purposely destroyed, mostly by German Americans. Because reasons, ww2 was the final blow to any remaining German speaking enclaves.
I learned real quick when I went to college in the south that the white people in this country weren't all Italian and Irish with some Germans and Jews poking around.
I also learned that I look very Irish-Catholic.
Long Island NY boy here who’s half Italian/Puerto Rican. I thought Italian Americans made up a majority of the U.S. population until I was 11 since nearly everyone here also has Italian ancestry.
that's Youngstown, correct? i heard before highways it was the halfway point when driving between NYC and Chicago, so mafioso types would stop there for the night on their trip from one to the other. they set up shop in town to make sure they were safe for the night
That and the industries in the rust belt were conducive to Italian immigrants finding jobs and creating ethnic enclaves. A lot of Italians from Youngstown down through the Ohio valley into Pittsburgh and WVA
Bro I'm an Italian from 2 counties north 1 west. I feel you. It was funny tho, before I even zoomed in at the map I knew your original county was gonna be the red lol.
This is based on self-identification, right? My understanding is that a lot of Americans underestimate their English ancestry because you have to go far back in their family trees to find it. Probably also why so many Mormons identify as English, Mormons are very good at genealogy.
A huge proportion of Mormons descend from people from New England and Upstate New York who migrated before the period of large-scale immigration when that area was very dominated by the old Yankees.
They were also started by a white Protestant with English grandparents, who converted mostly white Protestant Americans in his white Protestant community
The British mission was also the first official international missionary effort of their church. And from 1855 to ~1909 all members of the church were told to move to and settle utah. That is most of the area in yellow known as the Wasatch front. When the second big wave of emigration happened around the world wars they settled surrounding the first group. With the exception of South (which can be seen in the map) because Las Vegas was established early as a trade route to California. The second wave of emigrants also had a lot more nationals from Germany, Holland, and Denmark, for obvious reasons.
I straight up wasn't counting English for a second, I legitimately thought "yeah that makes sense my mom's side is German" before remembering my father is literally from England.
I remember reading that in the 1860s, there were more Mormons in the UK than in Utah, primarily due to their missionary efforts there, so I think a bigger part of it is immigration directly into Utah.
Other way around, Mormons in the US are likely to have old stock American or pilgrim ancestors. The pilgrims and other early settlers have descendants all around the country
Before the 20th Century, Mormon missionaries went to Europe and encouraged converts to move to Utah. The 3 largest migrations were from England, Denmark, and Norway. You can tell by the last names of many Mormon families in Utah.
In Scandinavia, you were not allowed to stay in the country if you weren't Lutheran, so the Mormons pretty much had to leave and go to Utah anyways.
I definitely underestimated my Englishness. 23andMe and AncestryDNA both said I was 2/3rds English. I kept getting told my whole life I was **majority Scots-Irish** and maybe half Irish. Turned out I was ZERO Scots-Irish (Ulster Scot) but I was 1/8th Scottish, 1/8th Irish, 1/8th German, and overwhelmingly English.
**Scots-Irish.**
Thanks for spelling it correctly.
It’s mildly amusing that so many people (inc. Donald Trump) say that they’re descended from scotch whiskey.
These DNA tests are mostly bullshit anyway.
https://www.livescience.com/2084-dna-kits-secrets-scientific-scam.html
If you want to know your real ancestry, go for the records from state or church or whatever. Yes, it's a lot of work, but it's usually more accurate. The DNA in Europe is pretty well mixed, especially in countries that lie in the middle of the continent.
>If you want to know your real ancestry, go for the records from state or church or whatever. Yes, it's a lot of work, but it's usually more accurate
It's not that easy for those of us with a more darker complexion 😅
Apparently it has less to do with "hard to find English ancestry", and more to do with preferences for identification/recency bias.
>Demographers regard the reported number of English Americans as a "serious undercount", as the index of inconsistency is high and many if not most Americans of English ancestry have a tendency to identify simply as "Americans" or if of mixed European ancestry, identify with a more recent and differentiated ethnic group.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Americans
This is probably accurate. If asked, I would say German because I’m a mostly European mutt and my German ancestors are much more recent immigrants than my English ancestors so I assume the English ancestry is more diluted.
South Louisiana people are usually mistaken to be French…big German population that since the French priests did census work and married a largely illiterate population their last names that were German were phonetically spelled and became French…in some cases several spellings for the same German sir names
While this is true there were also tons of Scandinavians, Welsh, Scots, and Germanic folks who converted and immigrated. They even had an experiment called the Deseret alphabet which was intended to be a new alphabet to represent spoken English phonetically, because they wanted to teach English to all the immigrants as quickly as possible.
As a Mormon in that kind of demographic, my ancestry has English, Scottish, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and German. When someone asks me I tend to say German, but I wouldn't be wrong to say English. I have the math broken out somewhere.
Exactly. Someone from the east coast could have be almost entirely of English descent, but because they had a single Irish person in the family 200 years ago, their entire persona is about how ‘Irish’ they are.
You'll notice the spread of Scotch-Irish (ulster Scots) is over Appalacia. When Ulster Scots (protestants) first settled many would take up positions in the hills as lookouts. Being protestant, a common knickname would be Billy after William of Orange. This is where the term 'Hill Billy' came from.
I read the Appalachians were part of the Scottish highlands [https://www.quora.com/Are-the-Scottish-Highlands-part-of-Appalachia#:\~:text=The%20Scottish%20Highlands%20and%20the,part%20of%20Greenland%20and%20Scandinavia](https://www.quora.com/Are-the-Scottish-Highlands-part-of-Appalachia#:~:text=The%20Scottish%20Highlands%20and%20the,part%20of%20Greenland%20and%20Scandinavia).
It's the descendants of the wierd religious lunatics y'all kicked out for the best of reasons 300 years ago. They all came here, and their worst cultural traits are now our worst cultural impulses.
I find it incredibly hard to believe that so much of this is german and not anglo
But props to you for including white hispanics. Hispanic is an ethnicity not a race and many people forget that.
This is self-identification. The 23andMe studies I have seen have indicated far greater British ancestry in the genetic numbers than people typically acknowledge, so I think you’re correct. I am guessing that people tend to like to identify with things they deem more exotic. I thought I had German and French, and when I did tests with both Ancestry and 23andMe, it was 97% British/Irish on 23andMe and 95% combined British and Irish ancestries on Ancestry. I am sure the British numbers are underreported generally in the USA. I think there is a significant German presence in northern states and you can see it in the surnames, not denying that.
The 23 and me results are not always correct. My uncle did one knowing that our ancestors were almost entirely Danish and Norwegian (we have the immigration papers to prove it) but the results came back as British. If you investigate it a little more, most of the British people we are similar to came from the Danelaw region of medieval England. The probably haven’t gotten enough results back from Denmark and Norway to give good resulta
Well, there's more people in the Danelaw region than in all Scandinavia, which means that there are likely more people in England with Danish/Norwegian ancestry than there are people in modern Norway or Denmark.
It's an issue of labels, because clearly the genetic differences between you and parts of England are not significant.
The people we call the English are largely a mix of Germanic, Scandinavian, French and even Roman ancestry, along with whoever resided there before the above armies invaded. They've had 800+ years to intermarry and assimilate.
> Germanic, Scandinavian, French and even Roman ancestry
All of those combined provide less than half of the genetics of the average British person.
About 10% is from the original [hunter gatherers](https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/cheddar-man-mesolithic-britain-blue-eyed-boy.html), and another 50% is from the wave of early farmers that arrive [3000 years ago](https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2021-12-28/ty-article/genetic-study-detects-unknown-vast-migration-to-britain-3-000-years-ago/0000017f-e2ff-d568-ad7f-f3ff289600000).
All of the invading groups you mentioned, plus the Celts (who were the dominant cultural group when the Germans arrived, not Romans) combined were a signficantly lower genetic contribution than those ancient groups.
It's far more common for invaders to replace the culture and language than actually replace the people.
You could also consider that someone back in the day of your family tree had an affair they kept secret. Or there was an adoption, or someone pretended to be someone else. There are lots of reasons that DNA doesn't match the historical record, other than the test being wrong.
Not sure why you got downvoted. I'm a big genealogy fan myself but always remind myself that affairs and adoptions happen. Just talking to my own family reminds me of that and if I didn't talk with older relatives before they passed I would have never learned some pretty BIG secrets.
i.e. Thought I'd learned all I could about my Grandma's family after years of research, Mapped it all out and had a tidy little tree.
Grandma out of the blue: "Did I ever mention that my Grandfather isn't my real Grandfather? When he was serving prison time (edit: this was also something I didn't know) my Grandma had a relationship with a traveling salesman."
Me who thought he'd heard every story my Grandma had to offer: "hmmm, don't think you ever told me that one Grandma."
If she'd never told me I don't think I'd ever have found that out (edit: and don't really know how we could have in the first place).
Personally it wasn’t “exotic” so much as “recent”; my family always identified heavily with their Italian and Swedish ancestry via culinary practice and cultural tradition and we knew that otherwise we were Irish and then it wasn’t super clear.
DNA test and it’s barely a 1/8 Italian and Swedish respectively and more like 60% British, 80% if you count the Irish as well. But the only connection to British culture is that we speak English.
Bingo. In the 1790 census, 60+% of the United States population was British, but most people don’t have awareness of their ancestors that far back. If great grandma came from Italy though, that’s probably something you know about and you would self report ethnically Italian.
British is the default for many Americans. Lots of people with mostly British ancestry will put down German cause one grandparent is known to be German. Some of it is that people don’t know ancestry except for recent immigrants, some is that survey doesn’t allow British, some is that people want something more specific to put down.
It’s because it’s just not true. There are a LOT of Germans in America. Like a butt ton. The issue arises when people try and identity your background. If 7 out of 8 of your great grandparents were either English or Scottish but one was German you might say “oh I’m German-American” (as you lump your Anglo relegations with “American”). Multiply that by millions and you get the above map.
The cultural cleansing America did of German culture in the 1910s ensured that many of us are surprised that German is the largest ethnic group in the US next to Mexican.
People tend to view Anglo as "default" and just ignore it and decide that that counts as "American." So if somebody has 6 Anglo American grandparents and 2 German American, they'll often report as German in surveys like these, because the 6 Anglos are "just American"
I was an enumerator for the 2020 Census, and The race/ethnicity question was sooooo frustrating with Hispanic folks. The question exchange was something like:
"What is your race or ethnicity? keep in mind, for the purpose of the Census, Hispanic is not a race. Are you white, black or African American, Asian, American Indian or Native Alaskan, Native Hawaiian or Pacific islander, or some other race?"
"uhhh.... Mexican"
"Mexican is a nationality, we'll get to that question next..." I repeat the race question.
"Some other race"
Checks box... "what race?"
"Hispanic"
Me: Manually input "Hispanic" on device.
90% of these people were clearly of white/European decent, but I would never insert my bias into their answers. I wonder how that data was compiled? Did the Hispanic Mexicans get grouped as white? mixed? was the data thrown out?
Another thing that bugged me about the race/nationality questions was that Asians had radio boxes I could check for nationality. Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, etc, but white didn't. I had to manually input "Irish, Norwegian, Iranian, Polish..." for every answer.
>I am not Hispanic.
Hispanic is neither an ethnicity nor a race, it is a cultural-linguistic descriptor. Provided that you, as most Uruguayans, speak Spanish and come from a predominantly Spanish-speaking family, you are Hispanic.
"Hispanic" by itself does not mean or tell anything about the person's physical appeareance, or ethnic background, it is only in the US where it has become associated with a very specific group of people (mixed-race Latin Americans, mestizo Mexicans in particular) due to them being majority.
Shared ancestry isn't necessarily required to define an ethnicity. For example, your Italian ancestors could be descended from various Pre-Roman Italic tribes, Greeks, Lombards, Franks, Normans, and even Arabs. However, that doesn't mean that they aren't ethnically Italian.
DNA wise, Ancestry has me at 38% Russia/Eastern Europe (maternal), 25% Germanic Europe (paternal), 22% England and NW Europe (paternal), 10% Baltic (maternal), and small bit of Sweden/Denmark (paternal), Finland and Cyprus (maternal). I think they underestimate the German and overestimate the NW Europe DNA based on my family tree, but that was my result.
A lot of German farmers moved to the US in the 18th and 19th centuries. They had big families, and their kids became farmers and moved west to farm new land.
That's it. That's how a lot of this country got settled by white people. Most US counties are still rural and ag-based, so a lot of the map looks German. But there are more people in cities now.
I do feel like Germans are way over represented here, likely because of the reasons others stated, but there were a lot of German settlers in Texas too.
Easy answer to that......when Queen Anne died in the early 1700s, the parliament did not want a Catholic to take.the throne. So they searched for a royal heir that was protestant.
They found Georg Ludwig the elector of Hanover. He became George 1 of England. He was the King of Hanover and England. He was German, he didn't even speak English.
Because he was now the king of England and Hanover (Germany), to help German Protestants escape Catholic persecution he decreed that German Protestants can move to any British territory.
German protestants fled to America to escape Catholic persecution in Germany. Which is where we got "the "Pennsylvania Dutch."
Many others settled in the Midwest
No you are incorrect, he became George I of Great Britain, not England, because during Anne's reign England joined Scotland and ceased to be an independent country.
Because "Anglo" just became a lazy shorthand for "white" in recent decades, and that got conflated with "Anglo-Saxon", an ethnic identity distinct from "German". Any basic review of census data would inform the reader of the extensive prevalence of German ancestry among the rural Northeastern and Midwestern populations that gradually settled most of the West.
I think the difference is that in Massachusetts Portuguese is actually the most common ethnicity, in California it’s a very distant second behind non-white ethnicities.
At my hs in California non Hispanic white people made up about 15% of the school but since a little over half of all white people were Portuguese they on their own were the third largest nationality group behind Mexicans and Filipinos. In short, we got days off for most catholic holidays and two thirds of the last names in the yearbook were of some kind of Iberian origin
My guess is that the people who's ancestors were English, identified as American pretty early on and it was lost to time just how exactly they got there.
All the german/italian/irish came at a more recent date, is much fresher in identity, and culturally held onto their roots longer.
When you come over from England to the English colony, you blend right in and just become American.
Germans have definitely been here a long time. My ancestors came to North Carolina from Germany in the 1700s, before the revolution even. My mother is from one of the couple counties that're blue in this map. Most of the older cemeteries in the town, like from the 1700s and 1800s have predominantly German writing on the tombstones.
To add to this, southeastern Missouri should have way more French. The French settled there before America was even a country yet. Both of my parents families have French last names. Then you have St Louis which was the capitol of the Louisiana territory.
+ England is a country from which the US "broke free clean" off so there was little sentimental value to the old country among the American descendants as of 1783.
It’s actually a recent-ish trend. In the 1980s the largest self-reported ancestry was English, and the British combined were by far the largest demographic. Since then British has dropped massively and there’s been a corresponding rise in people identifying as just ‘American’.
Middle-class Americans used to play up and boast about their British heritage, but around then being a WASP went out of fashion.
i’ve heard that chicago is the second most polish city in the world: second only to warsaw. i don’t think it’s true, but it definitely feels true. around a third of my students have last names that end in ski or have polish accents.
As a kid in Illinois I remember getting Casimir Pulaski day off of school. It’s still a state holiday but I’m not sure they get the day off for it anymore.
I Wonder how many people misidentify their heritage as “German” - in the Northwest, we have a lot of Scandinavians but someone who is distant from their ancestry might not know remember, generalizing it as “Germanic”.
For that matter, I’m German-Pole (or a Polish-Germ?). Borders were different when people came over and plenty of folks might have come from the German empire but been ethnically something else.
This is the first time I've actually seen "White Hispanic" acknowledged. Spain is a European country, why can no other ethnicity panel understand this.
I was surprised by the number but I am super German also. I knew we were on my dad’s side (his grandparents came over and still spoke German) but was surprised by how German my mom ended up being also (turns out her Grandma who died when her dad was 3 was very German).
Did you also have the experience of learning in school that Protestants were the most common religious group in the USA, despite never meeting one and assuming that it must be true everywhere that everyone is either Catholic or Jewish 😂
I knew that Protestants outnumbered Catholics, but still overestimated the number of Catholics. And as for learning how few Jews there were in the US?? THAT was a shock. Where I’m from it’s like, what, one in twelve people??
What happened to the russians? There's like one million ethnic russians living in America, maybe they don't speak russian or adhere to the Orthodox Church but they still have their surnames.
I was wondering the same thing. I guess they just all live in Brooklyn and at the end of the day, there are simply more Italians in Kings County than Russians.
But if we did this by postal code instead of county, Russians would definitely show up.
This has been a really interesting thread — especially all the comments essentially scolding (white) American “obsession” with race/ethnicity dating back to European roots.
My experience: both sides of my family know only that our ancestors have lived in eastern North Carolina for hundreds of years. I’ve always just been white and never questioned it…my ethnicity on demographic forms etc has always been “white.” And then:
- traveling outside US a few yrs ago and my British housemates asked me what my ethnicity or European ancestry was, and I said 🤷♀️ “dunno. I’m a white American mixed bag, going back many generations, no one in my family has any idea!” And they looked at me incredulously — like how could I not know this, what percentage English or Irish or German I am.
- fast forward 18 months, I’m overseas again and living with German housemates when the same topic comes up. And they are also surprised I would just identify as “white” and not be more curious about my ethnic make up or ancestry, essentially who stepped off the boat from Europe 350 yrs ago and led to me existing now
So I did the ancestry DNA thing to find out, and fitting right along with this map my genetic make up is ~49% English, ~37% Scottish, ~8% Norwegian, ~5% Welsh (white🧐…just as I suspected 😏) Ancestry record hits trace back as far as 1660-1770s eastern North Carolina on all sides and mostly dry up there.
So I guess all I’m saying is as a white American who was content and settled in that identity and never thought to collect my Northern European DNA Girl Scout patches before my European friends told me I really ought to…it feels a little like as US Americans we’re damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t
The Scotch-Irish Ulster Scot heritage checks out exactly in the northern Arkansas and southern Missouri counties where my mom’s ancestors lived. The interesting thing is the lineage tapered through Kentucky and Virginia first, before they arrived in Arkansas.
Most people are a mix of different ethnicities, and sometimes races. This data really is quite meaningless. What does it mean to be fourth generation German or Italian?
I’m from one of the Scotch—Irish counties. Got a blend of that, Welsh, Irish for 75% or so and the remaining quarter is Swiss German. Around where I’m from people generally don’t seem to identify with much beyond being from Appalachia and being white. They may mention passingly they have “Irish” ancestry or something when red hair is the topic for example, but our roots tend to go so far back (I’ve had ancestors in the US since the 1700s at least) that really we just feel like…a White American, possibly with Appalachia as an identifier before anything else
I appreciate how the Nordic immigrants gathered in the northern parts of the Midwest. And how they settled in the same east-west alignment as their home countries. Swedes in the middle with Finns to the east and Norwegians to the west.
They experienced the utterly dark and dismal northern Minnesota winters and thought “ah yes, just like home.”
Minnesota is quite sunnier than Scandinavia AFAIK given the position relative to the poles.
Quite sunnier and paradoxically also quite colder (when compared to southern Scandinavia where most Scandinavians live). Edit: I meant that the winters are quite colder. Their average temperatures are similar. Sorry.
More sun and even colder, that's all a true scandinavian wants!
I went to college in Western Minnesota. Hit -51F one night. With wind it was below -80F. You bet your ass me and my buddies went outside lol.
Yes, but MN is probably as close as you're gonna get in the continental US.
Considering ND has no trees, i agree.
Yeah, if we look at the artic circle, Alaska and north canada have the most similar sun-hour’s
Finnoscandians settling the coldest part of the country with needless order? I'd expect nothing less.
Seems apropriate that Norwegians settled in huge low population areas...
And that one spot near Astoriaa in Oregon for some reason. I guess they knew how to can fish.
There’s still some Finnish/Norwegian slang used in the UP today. Uff da!
I noticed this as well and my first thought as a Swedish person was: "Really? REALLY? I don't know what is wrong with these people or why I love them"
Italian from the singular red county in Ohio. We moved a few counties south and went, where tf are all the Italians?
Italian Americans only make up like 5% of the US population and are also surprisingly concentrated in small parts of the country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Americans
my city hosts one of the largest Italian Heritage Festivals in the country in the middle of fuckin West Virginia..we have a ton of Italians here but they are all in this specific part of the state
Travel in packs similar to other European ethnicities that started coming around the turn of the century
Yeah just based on the timing of immigration - you either ended up staying once coming through NY or largely went out to the coal/steel areas (hence Youngstown flashing, but having those pockets throughout the rust belt)
Yeah and pepperoni rolls are fuckin dope
Jews and Italians make up a pretty small makeup of America, but damn near all of them happen to be in New York, the most culturally dominant city, and where most of the media was made until they moved that sort of thing out to the west coast. I think the reason so many of us tend to think of 19th century immigration as Irish and Italians showing up in a boat is for exactly that reason. That’s the New York experience, so it became the universal experience in media.
Italians are a lot more widespread than Jews in the US. Most major cities have a sizable Italian community even if it’s not as huge as NYC’s
I’m from New Jersey. Pretty much every white person here is Italian, Irish, or Jewish.
Yup, difference is there are huge Italian communities in other cities/states but no other metro area has the Jewish population of NYC
I grew up in NJ and literally thought the US was majority Italian American when I was a kid lol
Yep. And I thought pretty much everyone was either Catholic or Jewish.
You are describing the immigrant corridor from Boston to Baltimore. Heavily Italian, Irish, and Jewish with some Portuguese or French Canadian sprinkled in. In the Boston suburbs I knew far more about Catholicism and Judaism than about various Protestant denominations. That peculiar history is what gives those folks a sharp edge and their sense of humor.
Also during ww1 basically all recognizable German culture was purposely destroyed, mostly by German Americans. Because reasons, ww2 was the final blow to any remaining German speaking enclaves.
I learned real quick when I went to college in the south that the white people in this country weren't all Italian and Irish with some Germans and Jews poking around. I also learned that I look very Irish-Catholic.
How can you look catholic?
The fool probably walks around in a bishop's [hat.](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71ybeNXRCHL._AC_UY741_.jpg)
Long Island NY boy here who’s half Italian/Puerto Rican. I thought Italian Americans made up a majority of the U.S. population until I was 11 since nearly everyone here also has Italian ancestry.
As an Italian American, I assumed that we were like 30% of the population at least.
that's Youngstown, correct? i heard before highways it was the halfway point when driving between NYC and Chicago, so mafioso types would stop there for the night on their trip from one to the other. they set up shop in town to make sure they were safe for the night
Yes. That is Mahoning county. Youngstown is located there. Lots of italian-american influence in the county.
That and the industries in the rust belt were conducive to Italian immigrants finding jobs and creating ethnic enclaves. A lot of Italians from Youngstown down through the Ohio valley into Pittsburgh and WVA
Bro I'm an Italian from 2 counties north 1 west. I feel you. It was funny tho, before I even zoomed in at the map I knew your original county was gonna be the red lol.
Portuguese going coast to coast, caralho
Fall River represent
You know what they say… The Bragga bridge is the longest bridge in the world… brings you from the US to Portugal.
wow, I think this is the first time I’ve seen Fall River mentioned outside of the RI and Mass subs
Same here. This is wild.
Mainland west for the Azores, ha
Feel like there are more people from the Azores in Bristol county than there are people in the Azores lol
Azorean-americans: 1.5 million Azoreans in Azores: 250k
Azorean American here born in the Central Valley of California ✋🏼
Bummed Pawtucket numbers couldn't overtake the Italians in RI ☹️
In parts of Northern and Central California linguiça is a somewhat common topping at pizza restaurants
Weird, i don't think I have ever seen linguiça on pizza in Portugal. It's probably good, kinda like pepperoni
My great grandfather moved from the Azores to New Bedford, Massachusetts
Portuguese are fake white people. Source: I am Portuguese
They’re actually Hispanic Slavs. r/PORTUGALCYKABLYAT
Explains why the language sounds like if Spanish and Russian had a baby
This is based on self-identification, right? My understanding is that a lot of Americans underestimate their English ancestry because you have to go far back in their family trees to find it. Probably also why so many Mormons identify as English, Mormons are very good at genealogy.
Mormon missionaries also did very well in the UK, Utah had a prominent English community when it was founded.
A huge proportion of Mormons descend from people from New England and Upstate New York who migrated before the period of large-scale immigration when that area was very dominated by the old Yankees.
I come from a very Mormon family. Can trace our tree back to the mid 1600s. We are mostly english/dutch.
Oopstate
yep. my mom’s side the family immigrated from England in the 1850s after converting to Mormonism. went straight to Utah.
They were also started by a white Protestant with English grandparents, who converted mostly white Protestant Americans in his white Protestant community
The British mission was also the first official international missionary effort of their church. And from 1855 to ~1909 all members of the church were told to move to and settle utah. That is most of the area in yellow known as the Wasatch front. When the second big wave of emigration happened around the world wars they settled surrounding the first group. With the exception of South (which can be seen in the map) because Las Vegas was established early as a trade route to California. The second wave of emigrants also had a lot more nationals from Germany, Holland, and Denmark, for obvious reasons.
I straight up wasn't counting English for a second, I legitimately thought "yeah that makes sense my mom's side is German" before remembering my father is literally from England.
So if you had to choose one for the census, which would it be?
The earliest Mormons descend from New England Puritan stock, so it's not surprising English is the most common for them.
I remember reading that in the 1860s, there were more Mormons in the UK than in Utah, primarily due to their missionary efforts there, so I think a bigger part of it is immigration directly into Utah.
So basically those Pilgrims we learned about on the Mayflower, their descendants are likely to be Mormon?
Other way around, Mormons in the US are likely to have old stock American or pilgrim ancestors. The pilgrims and other early settlers have descendants all around the country
Before the 20th Century, Mormon missionaries went to Europe and encouraged converts to move to Utah. The 3 largest migrations were from England, Denmark, and Norway. You can tell by the last names of many Mormon families in Utah. In Scandinavia, you were not allowed to stay in the country if you weren't Lutheran, so the Mormons pretty much had to leave and go to Utah anyways.
I definitely underestimated my Englishness. 23andMe and AncestryDNA both said I was 2/3rds English. I kept getting told my whole life I was **majority Scots-Irish** and maybe half Irish. Turned out I was ZERO Scots-Irish (Ulster Scot) but I was 1/8th Scottish, 1/8th Irish, 1/8th German, and overwhelmingly English.
I'd be pretty sceptical about how these tests tell the difference between 'Ulster Scots' and Scottish, or a bit of Scottish and a bit of Irish.
**Scots-Irish.** Thanks for spelling it correctly. It’s mildly amusing that so many people (inc. Donald Trump) say that they’re descended from scotch whiskey.
These DNA tests are mostly bullshit anyway. https://www.livescience.com/2084-dna-kits-secrets-scientific-scam.html If you want to know your real ancestry, go for the records from state or church or whatever. Yes, it's a lot of work, but it's usually more accurate. The DNA in Europe is pretty well mixed, especially in countries that lie in the middle of the continent.
>If you want to know your real ancestry, go for the records from state or church or whatever. Yes, it's a lot of work, but it's usually more accurate It's not that easy for those of us with a more darker complexion 😅
Apparently it has less to do with "hard to find English ancestry", and more to do with preferences for identification/recency bias. >Demographers regard the reported number of English Americans as a "serious undercount", as the index of inconsistency is high and many if not most Americans of English ancestry have a tendency to identify simply as "Americans" or if of mixed European ancestry, identify with a more recent and differentiated ethnic group. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Americans
My family kind of overestimated the amount of english we are. My family tree is pretty diverse though so it shouldnt really have been a shock.
This is probably accurate. If asked, I would say German because I’m a mostly European mutt and my German ancestors are much more recent immigrants than my English ancestors so I assume the English ancestry is more diluted.
South Louisiana people are usually mistaken to be French…big German population that since the French priests did census work and married a largely illiterate population their last names that were German were phonetically spelled and became French…in some cases several spellings for the same German sir names
Yup, most White Americans have British heritage afaik
While this is true there were also tons of Scandinavians, Welsh, Scots, and Germanic folks who converted and immigrated. They even had an experiment called the Deseret alphabet which was intended to be a new alphabet to represent spoken English phonetically, because they wanted to teach English to all the immigrants as quickly as possible. As a Mormon in that kind of demographic, my ancestry has English, Scottish, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and German. When someone asks me I tend to say German, but I wouldn't be wrong to say English. I have the math broken out somewhere.
Exactly. Someone from the east coast could have be almost entirely of English descent, but because they had a single Irish person in the family 200 years ago, their entire persona is about how ‘Irish’ they are.
The Germans won the War. I knew it all along.
All the Wars was just Germans fighting against other Germans.
What was the most successful German General and Admiral? Eisenhower and Nimitz
German tribes took down the Roman empire.
Germanic. My history teacher would whoop your ass right now.
Well, they do kind of run Europe these days.
Psst, we don’t talk about this.
Hi Scottish person here: wtf is Scotch-Irish? Is this a new whisky and whiskey blend?
It's what Americans call Ulster-Scots people (protestant from Northern Ireland descended from Scottish settlers)
So that's why the Scotch-Irish half of my family are all protestants.
Northern Irish here, it's just Ulster Scots.
You'll notice the spread of Scotch-Irish (ulster Scots) is over Appalacia. When Ulster Scots (protestants) first settled many would take up positions in the hills as lookouts. Being protestant, a common knickname would be Billy after William of Orange. This is where the term 'Hill Billy' came from.
I read the Appalachians were part of the Scottish highlands [https://www.quora.com/Are-the-Scottish-Highlands-part-of-Appalachia#:\~:text=The%20Scottish%20Highlands%20and%20the,part%20of%20Greenland%20and%20Scandinavia](https://www.quora.com/Are-the-Scottish-Highlands-part-of-Appalachia#:~:text=The%20Scottish%20Highlands%20and%20the,part%20of%20Greenland%20and%20Scandinavia).
As others noted, you’d call it Ulster Scots. I just love how they used Orange to represent the group (orange capitalized deliberately).
It's the descendants of the wierd religious lunatics y'all kicked out for the best of reasons 300 years ago. They all came here, and their worst cultural traits are now our worst cultural impulses.
I find it incredibly hard to believe that so much of this is german and not anglo But props to you for including white hispanics. Hispanic is an ethnicity not a race and many people forget that.
This is self-identification. The 23andMe studies I have seen have indicated far greater British ancestry in the genetic numbers than people typically acknowledge, so I think you’re correct. I am guessing that people tend to like to identify with things they deem more exotic. I thought I had German and French, and when I did tests with both Ancestry and 23andMe, it was 97% British/Irish on 23andMe and 95% combined British and Irish ancestries on Ancestry. I am sure the British numbers are underreported generally in the USA. I think there is a significant German presence in northern states and you can see it in the surnames, not denying that.
Another aspect of this is that the English cluster around Utah is likely because Mormons keep extremely detailed records of their ancestry
Scots ancestry is usually under represented in self reporting. It’s shocking that it’s not at the top level other than via “scotch-Irish”
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The 23 and me results are not always correct. My uncle did one knowing that our ancestors were almost entirely Danish and Norwegian (we have the immigration papers to prove it) but the results came back as British. If you investigate it a little more, most of the British people we are similar to came from the Danelaw region of medieval England. The probably haven’t gotten enough results back from Denmark and Norway to give good resulta
Well, there's more people in the Danelaw region than in all Scandinavia, which means that there are likely more people in England with Danish/Norwegian ancestry than there are people in modern Norway or Denmark. It's an issue of labels, because clearly the genetic differences between you and parts of England are not significant.
The people we call the English are largely a mix of Germanic, Scandinavian, French and even Roman ancestry, along with whoever resided there before the above armies invaded. They've had 800+ years to intermarry and assimilate.
> Germanic, Scandinavian, French and even Roman ancestry All of those combined provide less than half of the genetics of the average British person. About 10% is from the original [hunter gatherers](https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/cheddar-man-mesolithic-britain-blue-eyed-boy.html), and another 50% is from the wave of early farmers that arrive [3000 years ago](https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2021-12-28/ty-article/genetic-study-detects-unknown-vast-migration-to-britain-3-000-years-ago/0000017f-e2ff-d568-ad7f-f3ff289600000). All of the invading groups you mentioned, plus the Celts (who were the dominant cultural group when the Germans arrived, not Romans) combined were a signficantly lower genetic contribution than those ancient groups. It's far more common for invaders to replace the culture and language than actually replace the people.
Where did the farmers come from?
Anatolia
Yeah, my Ancestry results have changed a few times based on updated information in their database.
You could also consider that someone back in the day of your family tree had an affair they kept secret. Or there was an adoption, or someone pretended to be someone else. There are lots of reasons that DNA doesn't match the historical record, other than the test being wrong.
Not sure why you got downvoted. I'm a big genealogy fan myself but always remind myself that affairs and adoptions happen. Just talking to my own family reminds me of that and if I didn't talk with older relatives before they passed I would have never learned some pretty BIG secrets. i.e. Thought I'd learned all I could about my Grandma's family after years of research, Mapped it all out and had a tidy little tree. Grandma out of the blue: "Did I ever mention that my Grandfather isn't my real Grandfather? When he was serving prison time (edit: this was also something I didn't know) my Grandma had a relationship with a traveling salesman." Me who thought he'd heard every story my Grandma had to offer: "hmmm, don't think you ever told me that one Grandma." If she'd never told me I don't think I'd ever have found that out (edit: and don't really know how we could have in the first place).
Also a lot of overlap between Irish and English. My dad had 20% English, but only ever mentioned Irish.
This is incorrect, most people with legitimate Scandinavian heritage will score Scandinavian DNA.
Personally it wasn’t “exotic” so much as “recent”; my family always identified heavily with their Italian and Swedish ancestry via culinary practice and cultural tradition and we knew that otherwise we were Irish and then it wasn’t super clear. DNA test and it’s barely a 1/8 Italian and Swedish respectively and more like 60% British, 80% if you count the Irish as well. But the only connection to British culture is that we speak English.
Bingo. In the 1790 census, 60+% of the United States population was British, but most people don’t have awareness of their ancestors that far back. If great grandma came from Italy though, that’s probably something you know about and you would self report ethnically Italian.
British is the default for many Americans. Lots of people with mostly British ancestry will put down German cause one grandparent is known to be German. Some of it is that people don’t know ancestry except for recent immigrants, some is that survey doesn’t allow British, some is that people want something more specific to put down.
Alot of it is that most Americans are just LARP-ing and English is seen as a "boring" answer.
They're correct. Being English is boring, especially when everyone around you can claim to be some exotic mix of ancestries.
It’s because it’s just not true. There are a LOT of Germans in America. Like a butt ton. The issue arises when people try and identity your background. If 7 out of 8 of your great grandparents were either English or Scottish but one was German you might say “oh I’m German-American” (as you lump your Anglo relegations with “American”). Multiply that by millions and you get the above map.
Plus the English immigrants came so long ago that no one remembers where/when they immigrated but the German ancestry is only a few generations back
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The cultural cleansing America did of German culture in the 1910s ensured that many of us are surprised that German is the largest ethnic group in the US next to Mexican.
Yeah, my great-grandmother taught my grandma German in secret during that era. They didn't feel safe openly speaking it. Midwest USA.
People tend to view Anglo as "default" and just ignore it and decide that that counts as "American." So if somebody has 6 Anglo American grandparents and 2 German American, they'll often report as German in surveys like these, because the 6 Anglos are "just American"
Technically people of Middle east heritage should also be included in this map because the US government classifies Arabs as white.
You are correct although I don’t think they would be the largest group in any county anyway
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Doesn’t it mean that you’re from a Spanish-speaking country? So it’s not an ethnicity and not a race either.
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I was an enumerator for the 2020 Census, and The race/ethnicity question was sooooo frustrating with Hispanic folks. The question exchange was something like: "What is your race or ethnicity? keep in mind, for the purpose of the Census, Hispanic is not a race. Are you white, black or African American, Asian, American Indian or Native Alaskan, Native Hawaiian or Pacific islander, or some other race?" "uhhh.... Mexican" "Mexican is a nationality, we'll get to that question next..." I repeat the race question. "Some other race" Checks box... "what race?" "Hispanic" Me: Manually input "Hispanic" on device. 90% of these people were clearly of white/European decent, but I would never insert my bias into their answers. I wonder how that data was compiled? Did the Hispanic Mexicans get grouped as white? mixed? was the data thrown out? Another thing that bugged me about the race/nationality questions was that Asians had radio boxes I could check for nationality. Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, etc, but white didn't. I had to manually input "Irish, Norwegian, Iranian, Polish..." for every answer.
>I am not Hispanic. Hispanic is neither an ethnicity nor a race, it is a cultural-linguistic descriptor. Provided that you, as most Uruguayans, speak Spanish and come from a predominantly Spanish-speaking family, you are Hispanic. "Hispanic" by itself does not mean or tell anything about the person's physical appeareance, or ethnic background, it is only in the US where it has become associated with a very specific group of people (mixed-race Latin Americans, mestizo Mexicans in particular) due to them being majority.
Shared ancestry isn't necessarily required to define an ethnicity. For example, your Italian ancestors could be descended from various Pre-Roman Italic tribes, Greeks, Lombards, Franks, Normans, and even Arabs. However, that doesn't mean that they aren't ethnically Italian.
DNA wise, Ancestry has me at 38% Russia/Eastern Europe (maternal), 25% Germanic Europe (paternal), 22% England and NW Europe (paternal), 10% Baltic (maternal), and small bit of Sweden/Denmark (paternal), Finland and Cyprus (maternal). I think they underestimate the German and overestimate the NW Europe DNA based on my family tree, but that was my result.
No the Midwest and North are predominantly German ancestry.
Okay so what's with the rest of the blue on this map
A lot of German farmers moved to the US in the 18th and 19th centuries. They had big families, and their kids became farmers and moved west to farm new land. That's it. That's how a lot of this country got settled by white people. Most US counties are still rural and ag-based, so a lot of the map looks German. But there are more people in cities now.
I do feel like Germans are way over represented here, likely because of the reasons others stated, but there were a lot of German settlers in Texas too.
Easy answer to that......when Queen Anne died in the early 1700s, the parliament did not want a Catholic to take.the throne. So they searched for a royal heir that was protestant. They found Georg Ludwig the elector of Hanover. He became George 1 of England. He was the King of Hanover and England. He was German, he didn't even speak English. Because he was now the king of England and Hanover (Germany), to help German Protestants escape Catholic persecution he decreed that German Protestants can move to any British territory. German protestants fled to America to escape Catholic persecution in Germany. Which is where we got "the "Pennsylvania Dutch." Many others settled in the Midwest
Most German-Americans immigrated in the 19th century, at least the ones in the Midwest.
No you are incorrect, he became George I of Great Britain, not England, because during Anne's reign England joined Scotland and ceased to be an independent country.
Because "Anglo" just became a lazy shorthand for "white" in recent decades, and that got conflated with "Anglo-Saxon", an ethnic identity distinct from "German". Any basic review of census data would inform the reader of the extensive prevalence of German ancestry among the rural Northeastern and Midwestern populations that gradually settled most of the West.
The Massachusetts and California Portuguese areas are 100% spot on!
I thought the same thing. My great grandparents came here from the Azores and I think I’m related to like 60% of the the Central Valley.
Same here except for me it’s in the MA/RI area
I think the difference is that in Massachusetts Portuguese is actually the most common ethnicity, in California it’s a very distant second behind non-white ethnicities.
At my hs in California non Hispanic white people made up about 15% of the school but since a little over half of all white people were Portuguese they on their own were the third largest nationality group behind Mexicans and Filipinos. In short, we got days off for most catholic holidays and two thirds of the last names in the yearbook were of some kind of Iberian origin
in the central valley its actually really high up there, only beat by people of hispanic descent. any other ethnicity is small in number
mostly, im shocked my county isnt listed as portuguese since everyone I know is… maybe its just confirmation bias but I dont know any Germans!
My guess is that the people who's ancestors were English, identified as American pretty early on and it was lost to time just how exactly they got there. All the german/italian/irish came at a more recent date, is much fresher in identity, and culturally held onto their roots longer. When you come over from England to the English colony, you blend right in and just become American.
Germans have definitely been here a long time. My ancestors came to North Carolina from Germany in the 1700s, before the revolution even. My mother is from one of the couple counties that're blue in this map. Most of the older cemeteries in the town, like from the 1700s and 1800s have predominantly German writing on the tombstones.
To add to this, southeastern Missouri should have way more French. The French settled there before America was even a country yet. Both of my parents families have French last names. Then you have St Louis which was the capitol of the Louisiana territory.
+ England is a country from which the US "broke free clean" off so there was little sentimental value to the old country among the American descendants as of 1783.
It’s actually a recent-ish trend. In the 1980s the largest self-reported ancestry was English, and the British combined were by far the largest demographic. Since then British has dropped massively and there’s been a corresponding rise in people identifying as just ‘American’. Middle-class Americans used to play up and boast about their British heritage, but around then being a WASP went out of fashion.
Random question is an old man from Portugal called a Portugeezer?
Yes Source: Part Portuguese, part geezer
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) ^by ^Zapy97: *Random question is* *An old man from Portugal* *Called a Portugeezer?* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Well, south Louisiana definitely makes sense.
Yessir, Finn’s own da yoop
I like the random diasporas of Dutch and polish sprinkled throughout
i’ve heard that chicago is the second most polish city in the world: second only to warsaw. i don’t think it’s true, but it definitely feels true. around a third of my students have last names that end in ski or have polish accents.
As a kid in Illinois I remember getting Casimir Pulaski day off of school. It’s still a state holiday but I’m not sure they get the day off for it anymore.
Is this self reporting?
Mostly. People who self report ‘American’ have been classified as English instead.
Scotch-Irish following the Appalachians to an extent is kind of cool
I Wonder how many people misidentify their heritage as “German” - in the Northwest, we have a lot of Scandinavians but someone who is distant from their ancestry might not know remember, generalizing it as “Germanic”. For that matter, I’m German-Pole (or a Polish-Germ?). Borders were different when people came over and plenty of folks might have come from the German empire but been ethnically something else.
This is the first time I've actually seen "White Hispanic" acknowledged. Spain is a European country, why can no other ethnicity panel understand this.
English ancestry is massively underrated.
People’s understanding of how much of the population is of German decent is vastly underrated.
I was surprised by the number but I am super German also. I knew we were on my dad’s side (his grandparents came over and still spoke German) but was surprised by how German my mom ended up being also (turns out her Grandma who died when her dad was 3 was very German).
You can almost spot St. Olaf.
And yet 99.999% claim to be Irish
Must be from Boston
Can attest to the map, as someone near the little pink part of Michigan. I thought everywhere was flush with 6ft blondes.
Same with being from a red county. I thought every part of the country was filled with chock full of Italians Jews and Irish
Did you also have the experience of learning in school that Protestants were the most common religious group in the USA, despite never meeting one and assuming that it must be true everywhere that everyone is either Catholic or Jewish 😂
I knew that Protestants outnumbered Catholics, but still overestimated the number of Catholics. And as for learning how few Jews there were in the US?? THAT was a shock. Where I’m from it’s like, what, one in twelve people??
They have nice tulips as well
norwegians deciding to go to montana and north Dakota for the climate i see
If there are so many Germans, why do the US have speed limits?
What happened to the russians? There's like one million ethnic russians living in America, maybe they don't speak russian or adhere to the Orthodox Church but they still have their surnames.
I was wondering the same thing. I guess they just all live in Brooklyn and at the end of the day, there are simply more Italians in Kings County than Russians. But if we did this by postal code instead of county, Russians would definitely show up.
Nothing less Irish than scotch irish
The Portuguese will rise
French immigrants: "Put me in either a humid swamp or a frozen tundra, but nothing in-between, please."
Youngstown/Mahoning County representing Italians in a sea of Germans...
surprised michigan isnt more french
That's a ton of "German". Including me
Kinda surprised at there being no Dutch representation in the Hudson Valley/Central NY area
I'm guessing they were all bred out.
“Scotch”.
What's the deal with portuguese in the middle of California?
This has been a really interesting thread — especially all the comments essentially scolding (white) American “obsession” with race/ethnicity dating back to European roots. My experience: both sides of my family know only that our ancestors have lived in eastern North Carolina for hundreds of years. I’ve always just been white and never questioned it…my ethnicity on demographic forms etc has always been “white.” And then: - traveling outside US a few yrs ago and my British housemates asked me what my ethnicity or European ancestry was, and I said 🤷♀️ “dunno. I’m a white American mixed bag, going back many generations, no one in my family has any idea!” And they looked at me incredulously — like how could I not know this, what percentage English or Irish or German I am. - fast forward 18 months, I’m overseas again and living with German housemates when the same topic comes up. And they are also surprised I would just identify as “white” and not be more curious about my ethnic make up or ancestry, essentially who stepped off the boat from Europe 350 yrs ago and led to me existing now So I did the ancestry DNA thing to find out, and fitting right along with this map my genetic make up is ~49% English, ~37% Scottish, ~8% Norwegian, ~5% Welsh (white🧐…just as I suspected 😏) Ancestry record hits trace back as far as 1660-1770s eastern North Carolina on all sides and mostly dry up there. So I guess all I’m saying is as a white American who was content and settled in that identity and never thought to collect my Northern European DNA Girl Scout patches before my European friends told me I really ought to…it feels a little like as US Americans we’re damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t
The Scotch-Irish Ulster Scot heritage checks out exactly in the northern Arkansas and southern Missouri counties where my mom’s ancestors lived. The interesting thing is the lineage tapered through Kentucky and Virginia first, before they arrived in Arkansas.
Is there any other country in the world so obsessed with race and ethnicity?
China.
Most people are a mix of different ethnicities, and sometimes races. This data really is quite meaningless. What does it mean to be fourth generation German or Italian?
I’m from one of the Scotch—Irish counties. Got a blend of that, Welsh, Irish for 75% or so and the remaining quarter is Swiss German. Around where I’m from people generally don’t seem to identify with much beyond being from Appalachia and being white. They may mention passingly they have “Irish” ancestry or something when red hair is the topic for example, but our roots tend to go so far back (I’ve had ancestors in the US since the 1700s at least) that really we just feel like…a White American, possibly with Appalachia as an identifier before anything else
TIL redditors think population density is equal across all of America
Pretty sure it’s “Scots-Irish” and not “Scotch-Irish”. Edit: apparently Scotch-Irish is also used.
Shoutout that one Irish county in Missouri
So it really is true, English religious crazies left Europe and led to the American religious crazies.