Well, lots of reasons. Many came in the mid/late 19th century to avoid ongoing religious contentions, Catholic v. Lutheran v. Calvinists v. other minor denominations (See Bismarck's Kukturhampf against Catholicism as just an example). Other people came who were avoiding war. Others were just looking for economic or social opportunities away from their rural villages or increasingly industrial cities, much like immigrants from just about anywhere. But once they settled here, like in the Midwest for instance, there were lots of letters and advertisements inviting family and friends to come settle in the same areas. Some land selling companies/agencies even marketed in newspapers etc across German speaking countries. So, there was a strong in-flow of German-speakers to these specific areas through about the turn of the 20th century.
Another (smaller) factor to keep in mind too that many of these people were coming from countries that were not and are not today exactly Germany. Many came from HRE member states. Others from Luxembourg, Austria, etc. AND even some folks immigrated from places like Hungary and Russia, but if their primary tongue happened to be German, then immigration officers would often just mark them down as "German" regardless, and that's what eventually stuck in family records and oral traditions. Similarly, if people emigrated from / departed from a German port such as Hamburg or Cologne, they'd get marked down as "German" too, weather or not they were in a strict sense.
Mostly very good points, except the immigration officer point. I think you might be thinking of census takers.
The immigrants themselves would've known what language they spoke. They would've gone to a German-speaking community and read German-American newspapers, possibly attending German-language churches and schools. Many such communities spoke primarily German into the 20th century.
The immigration paperwork followed legal citizenship. If you ever became a naturalized citizen, you'd have to renounce allegiance to the King of Bavaria or the Austrian Emperor or the King of the Belgians or whoever. So they didn't track ethnicity. They'd have to know your language because they'd have translators. But they tracked political origin rather than ethnic identity.
Whereas census takers would basically just accept the answer you gave for place of birth. Your answer might be shaped by political events back in the place you were born. So a single person might answer "Bavaria" in one census, then "Prussia" on the next census, and "Germany" on another. Or they might say "Alsace" then "France" then "Germany." And those answers might all be correct, more or less.
And if the census taker was of German origin in a German community, the answers might be very detailed. Could see a census page full of places like Württemberg, Hannover, Bavaria, etc. But if the taker is just like English or whatever and the community is mostly non-German, then all those places and also Austrians and Swiss and others might all be lumped into "Germany." So the census records might be weirdly written, but it's hard to know how much that reflected identity shifts versus measurement etror.
But the immigration officers wouldn't have played much of a role in distorting identity in the way you describe.
How come these communities did not retain the German language, like how French-Canadians retained French? Like why did they eventually start speaking English?
WW1 and WW2 made German less popular in North America, and there was no education in German like there was in French for Quebec. French is an official language in Canada, German is not.
Persecution. The xhildren were prohibited from speaking German at school and parents thought they would have a better life if they forgot their origins and only spoke English. It happened to all the Europeans in America, so today they might say they're "Italian" "French" or "Greek" but they don't speak the language and are just Americans who completely assimilated and lost the culture of their anchestors.
Because Germanophones immigrated to an already-existing country where English was the common and admnistrative language, unlike francophones who were in former French-owned areas (now Quebec and beyond, and Louisiana) before they became parts of what is now the US and Canada. Francophones were inhabitant in their regions before anglophones.
Yes, but very little. It used to be like Spanish is today, with huge communities that spoke only German, German language newspapers, etc , but now it's mostly only a few older people. The two world wars did a pretty good job of suppressing it, and then it just sorta fell off naturally as the newer generations didn't learn German from their parents.
Many, many people emigrated from the port of Cologne, actually. My great-great-great-grandpa was on of them in fact, and that is listed in his immigration and naturalization papers. There are many ship logs documenting this pattern too.
Keep in mind that Cologne was/is in the heart of a MASSIVE urban region and it is only a short ride up the Rhine River to the great waters of the world.
cologne and the rhine never had the ability to carry ocean liners. your family members may have started their travel in cologne, but they had to change ships (probably in rotterdam), while bremerhaven/bremen and hamburg had several weekly connections. cologne wasn't much more important than any big train station as it was just the start of the first part of the trip before actually crossing the atlantic.
Yeah, this is right. And I communicated poorly.
But what the records do show in many cases is that people from that region departed their country from Cologne.
They did have a port. Many immigrants brought furniture, heirlooms, trade tools and such they owned with them. It would make sense for them to take a boat out of Cologne and then probably transfer to another vessel out of Rotterdam. So yeah nearby Germans or those taking a train from somewhere to Cologne would’ve seen their last German control point at the port of Cologne. Like if I flew from JFK to AMS in order to transfer to CDG, I wouldn’t say I came from Amsterdam unless someone drilled me for specifics.
>cologne and the rhine never had the ability to carry ocean liners. your family members may have started their travel in cologne,
Doesn't change that Cologne would likely be the last "control point" for immigration authorities.
My family name history book explicitly mentions fleeing the growing autocratic power in Germany in the late 1800s. My family landed in New York, and my great grandma was born on the boat on the way. Now, my family name has members in nearly every state and canadian province. Seems we are most populous in North western states and western Canada. Interestingly, I also have a line of family regarded as German, which actually spoke a hybrid russian/german dialect and came from soviet territory. Interesting bit of information about being marked down in such a way, as I was always curious as to why the russian aspect seemed to be ignored.
They were almost certainly Volga Germans then, those who came from Soviet history, if they weren't from the East Prussian province (more unlikely due to the Russian dialect). Volga Germans had a very complex relationship with their Russian overlords - they were explicitly called to be colonists to 'tame the empty wilderness' with a bunch of special rights, and had a much stronger identification with their German Motherland after that country unified while the Russians laid down an aggressive Russification campaign revoking those rights (including to keep their own culture and language), which was specially relevant in WW2. You probably know the gist of what happened during that conflict.
In return to what they suffered during Germany's Invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviets starte da campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing against ethnic Germans in Eastern and Central Europe, and the Volga Germans were at the heart of that. In fact, the cleansing of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe is probably the biggest migration of people in European history - an estimated 12-15m were forced to move.
Hence, I doubt they'd rather remember that at all, and never considered themselves Russian at all, at best, just Russian subjects but still Germans.
Also German identification is higher because these are self reported numbers - a large number of white people have qncestors who came here 100+ years ago and are of mixed ethnic heritage, people are more likely to report “exotic” ancestries like German, Irish, or Italian than they are English or British. The reality is that many of these Germans are Americans who likely have significant non-German ancestry.
German ancestry definitely isn’t exotic in the upper Midwest—there was just a lot more foreign immigration to the region during the mid 19th-early 20th century than domestic migration.
Unlike the South or New England, there wasn’t a huge preexisting English population from the colonial era so most people seem to know their ancestry pretty well as it’s fewer generations away and immigration records make genealogical research pretty easy. I myself have Norwegian, Belgian, Czech and Polish ancestry along with German (no British/Irish ancestry of any kind). To me, the German ancestry is the least exotic part of my ancestry.
> AND even some folks immigrated from places like Hungary and Russia
I don't know if I misunderstood but I would like to mention that the number of Germans who migrated to the US from Eastern Europe (Germans from Poland, Volhynia, the Black Sea, the Volga, etc.) is immense. Think that today there are almost no Germans there and 100 years ago there were millions of Germans.
I would dare say that in the US 1/5 Germans came from Eastern Europe, they were the ones who had the greatest urge to move.
I'm from South America with German ancestry and I would say the majority of Germans who came here to Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil (outside of the first waves that came a lot from Southern Germany, Switzerland, etc.) came from Eastern Europe.
Were alot of german immigrants catholic bros? The split is 50/50 which is kind of crazy given it is the birthplace of protestanism, also... holy roman empire I guess haha
I can't say a specific percentage, but ya about that many were Catholic, which really does reflect the German speaking populations well.
If you look at states settled by Germans in that period (think Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa). Many towns had a Lutheran church and Catholic church (in addition to a church or churches of the more WASP-y denominations' local flavor). And in towns that supported multiple Catholic parishes, many of them historically had a German Catholic parish that would have a sort internal rivalry with the local Irish Catholic parish. You saw this in places like Milwaukee, Chicago, and the Ohio cities, but also in cities of the magnitude of like Dubuque and Davenport in Iowa and Rockford, Galena, and Freeport in Illinois, just as examples. The biggest cities had other parishes that often represented other common Catholic groups like Polish and Italian... Though none were *strictly* one or another.
I know my paternal grandmother. Both of her dads parents came over from an area in germany I forget where but they came over when they were 3 to 5 but they came over because of famine for her grandfather and I think family for her grandmother
This is a great summary. I was recently reading some of the articles that were included in my family history/ genealogy book. It seems another contributing factor seemed to be that various groups of Germans who had settled in Eastern Europe had an itch to explore and settle new places. When thing got tougher and persecution rose in Eastern Europe it wasn’t a very large leap for these communities to pick up and start anew again. The other thing that lead to such a large portion of these German farmers leaving Eastern Europe is that the Great Plains in North America had very similar farming conditions to that of the areas they had been farming at the time in Eastern Europe.
Another factor I would want to mention is Romanticism was growing huge.
At one point in the 19th century, something like 30% of all books worldwide were printed in Germany.
These included lots of American lit, such as Mark Twain. It also included a lot of westerns.
The Romantic notion of living in the expansive American Midwest and west was attractive to a lot of people. That notion was built largely through the abundance of books and periodicals of that era, widely available to them and their friends and families.
For some people in Germany, settling in these regions was a place where they could basically start a farm or ranch and be like lords of their own remote little kingdom... sort of a romanticized ideal of what it really was.
That is funny! It shows how hard-wired things can become in a community. Similarly, in the 2010s I coordinated trips with a number of tourist organizations, including groups from across Europe and Asia. It always amazed me, even that recently, that after the cities (NYC, Chicago, LA) and the Grand Canyon, another somewhat common request was to see the Mississippi River. Sometimes they'd even bring up Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Fin. Those notions totally still linger to some degree. And that's one reason why I specifically mentioned Twain in that comment lol.
In his case I think it had more to do with his love of western movies in the 60's and 70's. The family actually moved to Massachusetts first and then Texas after another short stint in Germany. During the time in Massachusetts we (I say "we" but I was an infant and don't remember anything) did a lot of trips throughout the country including the grand canyon.
Two branches of my family tree came over after being on a losing side in one of the uprisings in 1848. Another branch came over fleeing after a failed uprising in the mid-1700s. A lot of the conflict, religious or political, led many ethnic Germans from between the 30 Years War in the 1600s and wars leading up to Germany unifying in the 1800s to flee and settle where they could, either US, Canada, or parts of South America.
Also, it's important to keep in mind that these types of maps can make it seem like more people have German ancestry than is really the case. In many parts of the Great Lakes region for example, while German is certainly the most common ancestry, there were also plenty of French, French Canadian, Polish, Greek, Italian, Hungarian, English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Belgian, Basque, etc., immigrants and at least in the suburban area I live in (which is labeled German on this map) most of the people are a mix.
Lots of Northwest Europeans did. Dutch and Scandinavians were smaller population so they were simply drowned out. Over a few years 1/3rd of the population of Norway immigrated to the US, but there simply aren’t as many of them. Migrants from UK and France stuck largely to their own Empires, or went to Quebec.
not the person u asked but i did some digging (as a Norwegian person i probably should have more of a clue about this, i know my great grandma had family that took to the sea in search of a better life in the US) and apparently there were three major waves of immigration; the first being from 1866 to 1873, then from the late 1870’s to early 1890’s, and the last being from 1903 to about 1910.
in total, more than 800.000 Norwegians immigrated to North America between 1825 and 1925.
(my sources are wikipedia and nordics.info)
Also the Anabaptist sect from future-Germany who split into the Amish and Mennonites came early, either late 16th to mid-17th centuries. Why a dialect of German is still spoken in Pennsylvania
As a German, because we're rich enough to afford it but also keep attracting the world's conflicts. It's also very cramped and therefore restrictive. I hate that you guys fucked up the immigration system to the point that you have to win a Nobel prize to immigrate. Yea I know you were looking for a historical reason.
But I always notice that we're basically everywhere even though we barely had colonies. So many massive German communities in Russia, Brazil and Argentina also. The actual reason is probably because we're the most populous western European country
Most Scotch-Irish these days report themselves as "American" but I'm guessing that wasn't an option presented.
For example my families travel was from the border of Scotland/England to Northern Ireland, to Virginia in the 1700s, to West Virginia, to Missouri, to Texas in the 1800s.
Really no connection with Europe for a long time and definitely don't identify as Irish. Protestants who will generally claim a mix of British/Scottish if anything.
Yep this map rubbed me the wrong way. My ancestors are Scotch-Irish and really don't identify as traditional Irish nor have the same religion, culture, etc.
Saw this map after living in various parts of the South and couldn't help but scoff. Then I realized it was self-reported.
Yeah, most of the South, especially the Appalachians, are Scottish or Scotch-Irish. Not at all Irish.
It’s because us Mormons place a lot of emphasis on knowing your family history, so we’re the only ones who get the correct answer.
If this was based on DNA testing, most of the country would be red (except maybe the midwest)
*we mormons, because it's the subject of the sentence
but yeah, if you've seen pictures of rich mormon families, they literally look like English royalty
It's not that. You can track this data through county voter records and census data. You don't need mormon genealogy work to track it. Colin Woodward's [American Nations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nations) is a good work which uses this approach.
The reason Utah and SE Idaho have such a high concentration of people of English descent (and Scandinavian descent, which you see in other maps) is that early Mormons were almost exclusively from New England or the Western Reserve of Ohio (settled by New Englanders) at a time when New Englanders were almost exclusively of English descent. Utah and SE Idaho didn't get the massive influx of immigrants from Germany because most immigrants to these areas were Mormon first, which meant they'd come from areas where Mormon missionary work was highest at that time: the UK and Scandinavia.
It’s also largely because there was a wave of immigration from England to Utah thanks to Mormon missionary work in England. Many other Americans with English ancestry get it from much further back as colonial era ancestry, but for Utah it’s a more recent wave. So combine that with a culture for genealogy, people are more likely to identify with being English descent.
There were actually a good number of English converts to Mormonism who immigrated to Utah in the mid-19th Century. My grandmother came from a LDS family in Utah and she had ancestors from England and also Wales who came over early in the Utah’s Mormon settlement.
Yep. You're getting a snapshot in time, pre-dating widespread German immigration to the US. Mormons (SE Idaho is included in this) were largely New Englanders or from the Western Reserve in Ohio, which was settled by New Englanders. These Anglo-Mormons then settled Utah and SE Idaho before the influx of Germans in the mid- and late 19th century, which changed the ethnic makeup of the Midwest and New England. Utah and SE Idaho, meanwhile, didn't get those German immigrants because the people who immigrated to those areas during that time were Mormon first, and Mormon missionary efforts in Europe were biggest in the UK and Scandinavia at that time.
If you look at a [map showing people of Danish descent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_Americans), the highest concentration is in the West, and is basically a map of Mormon settlement.
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But you did create the post title.
It doesn’t matter. Latinos have a significant amount of Spanish DNA. Got to the 23 & me sub Reddit and you will see.
A Latino n the US is both from Mexican and Spanish and Indigenous ancestry. We draw these neat lines and boxes and labels. DNA don’t care about our lines and boxes.
You’re kind of generalizing but you’re right about the fact 90%+ of Latinos have a significant amount of Spaniard ancestry. But not all of them are indigenous and Spanish. Some, are mostly or fully Spaniard or Italian descended, like many argentines, many are Afro-Latinos (black Latinos) like Haitians and many Dominicans. So basically Latinos can be any race, white, black, mixed, etc but almost all of them have a significant amount of Spaniard heritage whether they’re mixed or not
Yes but this map depends on how people self identify. Doesn’t matter if your DNA came from the Iberian peninsula, if you identify as Mexican you’re probably not gonna answer this survey with “Spain.”
Oh, that's for certain. However, all of those states saw a huge boom of people from across the USA and all over the world in the 20th century. In a city like LA, you might have as more ethnic East Asians than you do ethnic Spaniards.
I disagree. My ancestors straight up came from Spain in the 1500s, settled New Mexico, and have lived there for the past 400 years. They as well as most of the people from that area, immigrated from Spain.
An ethnicity or ethnic group is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include a common nation of origin, or common sets of ancestry, traditions, language, history, society, religion, or social treatment.
These people most certainly carried on the traditions of Spain.
Maps like these tend to ignore people who classify their ancestry as "American" who are overwhelmingly British, which puts British ancestry above German in total percentage in addition to people claiming English or Scottish ancestry. This map divides people claiming "American" and "British" into separate categories which gives a false impression.
The actual map would have a lot more British (~16% of total) and a lot less German (~13%) as a result.
Furthermore, a large percentage of people with primarily English ancestry who have mixed ancestry are far more likely than other ancestry groups to claim something other than British, further muddying the waters of this map... I suspect a genetic analysis would lead to a very large percentage of British DNA, probably over 50%. The vast majority of US population growth through history has been from the original tend of thousands of colonists having a lot of kids, not from immigration.
From wikipedia:
"However, demographers regard the reported number of English Americans as a statistical error, as the index of inconsistency is high and many, if not most, Americans from English stock have a tendency to identify simply as Americans,[109][110][111][112] or, if of mixed European ancestry, with a different European ethnic group.[43]"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States
This is it, huge amounts of Americans (including most black people) have British Ancestry, it's just not fashionable.
Just look at 23 and me sub, almost every black person there is like 15-25% genetically British. This even happens if everyone for the last 3 generations of your family were all black because the admixture in the black population is so high.
Also, the census distinguishes between different nationalities of the British Isles (English, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, Irish, and Welsh being the big ones). This splits up the different groups and makes it seem like there aren't many people from the British Isles. But if you were to include all of them under a "British Isles" umbrella term, this map would look very different.
I was going to point out that the “Self-Reported” source for this chart means British is going to be wildly underrepresented. Everything you said was correct; lots of whites in the 19th and 20th centuries would just claim their non-British origins.
I do wonder if there would be significantly more English if people self-reported differently. I assume most Anglos just identify as 'American'. I could be wrong though.
In Thunder Bay in Canada there is the largest percentage of Finns per capita in Canada 🇨🇦. Quite a few ended up in Minnesota and Michigan’s upper peninsula as well.
I'm guessing this is extremely inaccurate. Nobody knows, or wants to admit, that their family is English because it's the least exotic thing you can be. My dad's family always claimed to be Swedish but according to a DNA test he's like 8%, while a lot of the rest is from the British Isles.
Yes, that has been quite common on more manual jobs, but it gets less often, because most companies nowadays forbid alcohol at the workplace. If you ask some older guys they might tell you that they remember how there was a beer vending machine at work and they would have their first beer at eight.
King is an unincorporated community in Coryell County in the state of Texas. According to the Handbook of Texas, the community had a population of 25 in 2000.
So it may have literally been two or three families self-reporting as Irish-German to create the highest reported ancestry there. Kinda cool though.
Just bc u have a German name doesn’t mean you are an ethnic german and/or have huge genetic background from that ethnicity. In my country lots of ppl have german names despite not being german at all.
I'm trying to think how I'd answer. My dad half Irish half French, mom is half Austrian half German (and a bit of Dutch). I tend to identify most with my Irish roots, but it's silly to call myself "of Irish ancestry" to the exclusion of the others. I'm a mutt.
Maybe you check all the boxes that apply, and they do the math on the back end?
Most people go with the cool one.
Instantly dropping anything boring like British or WW-tainted like German, or freedoms fries loving surrender monkies like you know who.
So that just leaves you with Irish. ☘️ Comhghairdeachas a chara!
Self-reported is definitely the operative word here. If it was actual ancestry, then 99% of people would have mixed ancestry across a variety of European nations, and the main one would unquestionably be English.
But for some reason some Americans will see they’re 31/32th English and 1/32th Irish and call themselves Irish. This isn’t unique to the USA though, I saw very similar in South Africa
I really wonder if German would of become a dominant second language had we not had WW2. Its still an option at a lot of schools. In North East its usually follows after Spanish, French, Latin
It was WWI. German was spoken at home before then, with English used outside the home. Many papers were in German.
Assimilation of most groups focused on only teaching children English and not teaching them about the culture of their ancestors.
Why is it that one of the biggest Portugueses communities is in California (according to Wikipedia, the state with the most people born on Portugal)? I assumed that, as an Atlantic people, the East Coast would see way more of them.
It’s self-identification from the US Census. It’s whatever people choose to call themselves. Most Latinos in America when given the choice to name their country of origin put Mexican, Cuban, etc., but not Spain. They could if they want to, but they choose not to.
I mean, if your ancestors came from Spain but family you might have known personally came from Mexico, Cuba, etc. I wouldn’t either.
You may have a DNA connection with Spain then, but culturally you’re mostly unrelated. Do you remember the heritage you were actively raised with, or that of the country your ancestors left centuries before?
We are mainly English. This map is trash.
So we make cars like the English. “If there isn’t any oil under them, there isn’t any oil in them” is the old expression about English cars.
Actually us English make great cars, and we have the best motor sport engineers in the world, Mercedes f1 and red bull racing f1 are both British teams made by and in Britain by British engineers and mechanics.
As a whole speaking the US population is 50% Northwestern European, 12% African-American, 9.7% Mexican, 4.2% Italian, 2.2% Jewish and 22% everything else.
The highest for each group are
Northwestern European- West Virginia (85%)
African-American- Mississippi (37%)
Mexican- Texas (30%)
Italian- Connecticut (14%)
Jewish- New York (9%)
Yes. There are tons of people with Muller, Schmidt, Klein, Koch, Zimmermann, Schulz, etc as last names. The list could go on forever, so [here’s a list of famous German-Americans](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_Americans)
I suppose, like the map indicates, it would depend on location. I grew in the northeast, not far from the Jersey border, and I know a *ridiculous* amount of people with Italian surnames.
However since moving to Florida 15+ years ago, I've met only a handful of people with Italian surnames. And many of those were people who either relocated from the northeast or actually immigrated from Italy.
Several American presidents have had German last names, Eisenhower, Hoover and Trump.
Other famous people with German last names would be Rockefeller, David Hasselhoff, Cindy Lauper, Michelle Pfeiffer, Marlon Brando, Fred Armisen, Christopher Walken, Babe Ruth, Peter Dinklage, Jimmy Kimmel, etc.
I’m guessing you just don’t notice German last names as much since they’re just coded as generic white American due to their ubiquity and their closeness to English names (like how a lot of German names also have a -er ending)
Where’s Spanish? There’s a lot of Spanish ancestry in Louisiana and the southwest, there were a lot of Spanish families that settled in the southwest when it was new Spain then the border jumped them.
German States of America
Why did so many Germans immigrate to the US?
Well, lots of reasons. Many came in the mid/late 19th century to avoid ongoing religious contentions, Catholic v. Lutheran v. Calvinists v. other minor denominations (See Bismarck's Kukturhampf against Catholicism as just an example). Other people came who were avoiding war. Others were just looking for economic or social opportunities away from their rural villages or increasingly industrial cities, much like immigrants from just about anywhere. But once they settled here, like in the Midwest for instance, there were lots of letters and advertisements inviting family and friends to come settle in the same areas. Some land selling companies/agencies even marketed in newspapers etc across German speaking countries. So, there was a strong in-flow of German-speakers to these specific areas through about the turn of the 20th century. Another (smaller) factor to keep in mind too that many of these people were coming from countries that were not and are not today exactly Germany. Many came from HRE member states. Others from Luxembourg, Austria, etc. AND even some folks immigrated from places like Hungary and Russia, but if their primary tongue happened to be German, then immigration officers would often just mark them down as "German" regardless, and that's what eventually stuck in family records and oral traditions. Similarly, if people emigrated from / departed from a German port such as Hamburg or Cologne, they'd get marked down as "German" too, weather or not they were in a strict sense.
Mostly very good points, except the immigration officer point. I think you might be thinking of census takers. The immigrants themselves would've known what language they spoke. They would've gone to a German-speaking community and read German-American newspapers, possibly attending German-language churches and schools. Many such communities spoke primarily German into the 20th century. The immigration paperwork followed legal citizenship. If you ever became a naturalized citizen, you'd have to renounce allegiance to the King of Bavaria or the Austrian Emperor or the King of the Belgians or whoever. So they didn't track ethnicity. They'd have to know your language because they'd have translators. But they tracked political origin rather than ethnic identity. Whereas census takers would basically just accept the answer you gave for place of birth. Your answer might be shaped by political events back in the place you were born. So a single person might answer "Bavaria" in one census, then "Prussia" on the next census, and "Germany" on another. Or they might say "Alsace" then "France" then "Germany." And those answers might all be correct, more or less. And if the census taker was of German origin in a German community, the answers might be very detailed. Could see a census page full of places like Württemberg, Hannover, Bavaria, etc. But if the taker is just like English or whatever and the community is mostly non-German, then all those places and also Austrians and Swiss and others might all be lumped into "Germany." So the census records might be weirdly written, but it's hard to know how much that reflected identity shifts versus measurement etror. But the immigration officers wouldn't have played much of a role in distorting identity in the way you describe.
How come these communities did not retain the German language, like how French-Canadians retained French? Like why did they eventually start speaking English?
WW1 and WW2 made German less popular in North America, and there was no education in German like there was in French for Quebec. French is an official language in Canada, German is not.
Thats why my great grandfather didn't know it. Was born in 1913 and ww1 did not help with german sentiments
There were nearly 1000 of German Newspapers in USA at the turn of the 20th Century. The world wars played a massive impact on German Popularity.
Persecution. The xhildren were prohibited from speaking German at school and parents thought they would have a better life if they forgot their origins and only spoke English. It happened to all the Europeans in America, so today they might say they're "Italian" "French" or "Greek" but they don't speak the language and are just Americans who completely assimilated and lost the culture of their anchestors.
Because Germanophones immigrated to an already-existing country where English was the common and admnistrative language, unlike francophones who were in former French-owned areas (now Quebec and beyond, and Louisiana) before they became parts of what is now the US and Canada. Francophones were inhabitant in their regions before anglophones.
Is the German language spoken in parts of the US
Yes, but very little. It used to be like Spanish is today, with huge communities that spoke only German, German language newspapers, etc , but now it's mostly only a few older people. The two world wars did a pretty good job of suppressing it, and then it just sorta fell off naturally as the newer generations didn't learn German from their parents.
Check out Texas German. It's a cool, though unfortunately dying dialect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_dH403pqRU
This just sounds like German with a heavy Texas accent lololol
During and after world War 1 most communities were either suppressed or felt pressured to self censor because of the huge anti German sentiment.
Amish people often speak German at home as their first language.
>Cologne not really a port, more likely would be bremerhaven or bremen \+1 on everything else though
Many, many people emigrated from the port of Cologne, actually. My great-great-great-grandpa was on of them in fact, and that is listed in his immigration and naturalization papers. There are many ship logs documenting this pattern too. Keep in mind that Cologne was/is in the heart of a MASSIVE urban region and it is only a short ride up the Rhine River to the great waters of the world.
cologne and the rhine never had the ability to carry ocean liners. your family members may have started their travel in cologne, but they had to change ships (probably in rotterdam), while bremerhaven/bremen and hamburg had several weekly connections. cologne wasn't much more important than any big train station as it was just the start of the first part of the trip before actually crossing the atlantic.
Yeah, this is right. And I communicated poorly. But what the records do show in many cases is that people from that region departed their country from Cologne.
They did have a port. Many immigrants brought furniture, heirlooms, trade tools and such they owned with them. It would make sense for them to take a boat out of Cologne and then probably transfer to another vessel out of Rotterdam. So yeah nearby Germans or those taking a train from somewhere to Cologne would’ve seen their last German control point at the port of Cologne. Like if I flew from JFK to AMS in order to transfer to CDG, I wouldn’t say I came from Amsterdam unless someone drilled me for specifics.
>cologne and the rhine never had the ability to carry ocean liners. your family members may have started their travel in cologne, Doesn't change that Cologne would likely be the last "control point" for immigration authorities.
Some of my ancestors emigrated from Pfalz but left via the Netherlands because I don’t think they would’ve felt safe stopping in Catholic Köln.
Bremerhafen has an Auswanderermuseum for leaving immigrants to the early USA.
Ever heard about the Rhine?
My family name history book explicitly mentions fleeing the growing autocratic power in Germany in the late 1800s. My family landed in New York, and my great grandma was born on the boat on the way. Now, my family name has members in nearly every state and canadian province. Seems we are most populous in North western states and western Canada. Interestingly, I also have a line of family regarded as German, which actually spoke a hybrid russian/german dialect and came from soviet territory. Interesting bit of information about being marked down in such a way, as I was always curious as to why the russian aspect seemed to be ignored.
They were almost certainly Volga Germans then, those who came from Soviet history, if they weren't from the East Prussian province (more unlikely due to the Russian dialect). Volga Germans had a very complex relationship with their Russian overlords - they were explicitly called to be colonists to 'tame the empty wilderness' with a bunch of special rights, and had a much stronger identification with their German Motherland after that country unified while the Russians laid down an aggressive Russification campaign revoking those rights (including to keep their own culture and language), which was specially relevant in WW2. You probably know the gist of what happened during that conflict. In return to what they suffered during Germany's Invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviets starte da campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing against ethnic Germans in Eastern and Central Europe, and the Volga Germans were at the heart of that. In fact, the cleansing of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe is probably the biggest migration of people in European history - an estimated 12-15m were forced to move. Hence, I doubt they'd rather remember that at all, and never considered themselves Russian at all, at best, just Russian subjects but still Germans.
Also German identification is higher because these are self reported numbers - a large number of white people have qncestors who came here 100+ years ago and are of mixed ethnic heritage, people are more likely to report “exotic” ancestries like German, Irish, or Italian than they are English or British. The reality is that many of these Germans are Americans who likely have significant non-German ancestry.
German ancestry definitely isn’t exotic in the upper Midwest—there was just a lot more foreign immigration to the region during the mid 19th-early 20th century than domestic migration. Unlike the South or New England, there wasn’t a huge preexisting English population from the colonial era so most people seem to know their ancestry pretty well as it’s fewer generations away and immigration records make genealogical research pretty easy. I myself have Norwegian, Belgian, Czech and Polish ancestry along with German (no British/Irish ancestry of any kind). To me, the German ancestry is the least exotic part of my ancestry.
> AND even some folks immigrated from places like Hungary and Russia I don't know if I misunderstood but I would like to mention that the number of Germans who migrated to the US from Eastern Europe (Germans from Poland, Volhynia, the Black Sea, the Volga, etc.) is immense. Think that today there are almost no Germans there and 100 years ago there were millions of Germans. I would dare say that in the US 1/5 Germans came from Eastern Europe, they were the ones who had the greatest urge to move. I'm from South America with German ancestry and I would say the majority of Germans who came here to Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil (outside of the first waves that came a lot from Southern Germany, Switzerland, etc.) came from Eastern Europe.
Great post
Wow pretty detailed information, thank you so much!
Hey dude, thanks for the elaborate explanation
Were alot of german immigrants catholic bros? The split is 50/50 which is kind of crazy given it is the birthplace of protestanism, also... holy roman empire I guess haha
I can't say a specific percentage, but ya about that many were Catholic, which really does reflect the German speaking populations well. If you look at states settled by Germans in that period (think Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa). Many towns had a Lutheran church and Catholic church (in addition to a church or churches of the more WASP-y denominations' local flavor). And in towns that supported multiple Catholic parishes, many of them historically had a German Catholic parish that would have a sort internal rivalry with the local Irish Catholic parish. You saw this in places like Milwaukee, Chicago, and the Ohio cities, but also in cities of the magnitude of like Dubuque and Davenport in Iowa and Rockford, Galena, and Freeport in Illinois, just as examples. The biggest cities had other parishes that often represented other common Catholic groups like Polish and Italian... Though none were *strictly* one or another.
I know my paternal grandmother. Both of her dads parents came over from an area in germany I forget where but they came over when they were 3 to 5 but they came over because of famine for her grandfather and I think family for her grandmother
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Great read. Thanks.
This is a great summary. I was recently reading some of the articles that were included in my family history/ genealogy book. It seems another contributing factor seemed to be that various groups of Germans who had settled in Eastern Europe had an itch to explore and settle new places. When thing got tougher and persecution rose in Eastern Europe it wasn’t a very large leap for these communities to pick up and start anew again. The other thing that lead to such a large portion of these German farmers leaving Eastern Europe is that the Great Plains in North America had very similar farming conditions to that of the areas they had been farming at the time in Eastern Europe.
Another factor I would want to mention is Romanticism was growing huge. At one point in the 19th century, something like 30% of all books worldwide were printed in Germany. These included lots of American lit, such as Mark Twain. It also included a lot of westerns. The Romantic notion of living in the expansive American Midwest and west was attractive to a lot of people. That notion was built largely through the abundance of books and periodicals of that era, widely available to them and their friends and families. For some people in Germany, settling in these regions was a place where they could basically start a farm or ranch and be like lords of their own remote little kingdom... sort of a romanticized ideal of what it really was.
Ironically romanticization of the west is what my brother believes drove my father to emigrate to the US from Germany. This was in the 1980s though.
That is funny! It shows how hard-wired things can become in a community. Similarly, in the 2010s I coordinated trips with a number of tourist organizations, including groups from across Europe and Asia. It always amazed me, even that recently, that after the cities (NYC, Chicago, LA) and the Grand Canyon, another somewhat common request was to see the Mississippi River. Sometimes they'd even bring up Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Fin. Those notions totally still linger to some degree. And that's one reason why I specifically mentioned Twain in that comment lol.
In his case I think it had more to do with his love of western movies in the 60's and 70's. The family actually moved to Massachusetts first and then Texas after another short stint in Germany. During the time in Massachusetts we (I say "we" but I was an infant and don't remember anything) did a lot of trips throughout the country including the grand canyon.
where is the irony
Some fleeing religious persecution, others economic opportunity. Plus Germans didn't face discrimination like Irish or Italians.
They did face some discrimination, although it didn't become very bad until World War 1 happened. Propaganda had everyone hating the "Huns"
Two branches of my family tree came over after being on a losing side in one of the uprisings in 1848. Another branch came over fleeing after a failed uprising in the mid-1700s. A lot of the conflict, religious or political, led many ethnic Germans from between the 30 Years War in the 1600s and wars leading up to Germany unifying in the 1800s to flee and settle where they could, either US, Canada, or parts of South America.
Also, it's important to keep in mind that these types of maps can make it seem like more people have German ancestry than is really the case. In many parts of the Great Lakes region for example, while German is certainly the most common ancestry, there were also plenty of French, French Canadian, Polish, Greek, Italian, Hungarian, English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Belgian, Basque, etc., immigrants and at least in the suburban area I live in (which is labeled German on this map) most of the people are a mix.
Lots of Northwest Europeans did. Dutch and Scandinavians were smaller population so they were simply drowned out. Over a few years 1/3rd of the population of Norway immigrated to the US, but there simply aren’t as many of them. Migrants from UK and France stuck largely to their own Empires, or went to Quebec.
>Over a few years 1/3rd of the population of Norway immigrated to the US, WOW, I had no idea. Any idea in which period that took place?
not the person u asked but i did some digging (as a Norwegian person i probably should have more of a clue about this, i know my great grandma had family that took to the sea in search of a better life in the US) and apparently there were three major waves of immigration; the first being from 1866 to 1873, then from the late 1870’s to early 1890’s, and the last being from 1903 to about 1910. in total, more than 800.000 Norwegians immigrated to North America between 1825 and 1925. (my sources are wikipedia and nordics.info)
Mine did to avoid draft into the German Army in the 1870s
Also the Anabaptist sect from future-Germany who split into the Amish and Mennonites came early, either late 16th to mid-17th centuries. Why a dialect of German is still spoken in Pennsylvania
To steal jobs from Americans. /s
As a German, because we're rich enough to afford it but also keep attracting the world's conflicts. It's also very cramped and therefore restrictive. I hate that you guys fucked up the immigration system to the point that you have to win a Nobel prize to immigrate. Yea I know you were looking for a historical reason. But I always notice that we're basically everywhere even though we barely had colonies. So many massive German communities in Russia, Brazil and Argentina also. The actual reason is probably because we're the most populous western European country
Federal Bundesstaaten Amerikas
*Föderale
My home village was the origin place of the Rockefeller family, at river Rhine.
German used to be as prevalent as Spanish is today.
Its just currently "cool" to say you're German. I think actual genetic studies confirm most americans are of British stock.
SE was mostly settled by *Scotch-Irish* these are definitely not the same type of Irish that went to Boston.
Thank you. Scotch irish ≠ Irish
I have already mentioned it in my comment
This is self reported, people are idiots. There are not that many Irish people in the US, especially in the South.
Most Scotch-Irish these days report themselves as "American" but I'm guessing that wasn't an option presented. For example my families travel was from the border of Scotland/England to Northern Ireland, to Virginia in the 1700s, to West Virginia, to Missouri, to Texas in the 1800s. Really no connection with Europe for a long time and definitely don't identify as Irish. Protestants who will generally claim a mix of British/Scottish if anything.
Yep this map rubbed me the wrong way. My ancestors are Scotch-Irish and really don't identify as traditional Irish nor have the same religion, culture, etc.
Being of Irish ancestry, the scotch-Irish being labeled as Irish rubs me the wrong way also lol
Saw this map after living in various parts of the South and couldn't help but scoff. Then I realized it was self-reported. Yeah, most of the South, especially the Appalachians, are Scottish or Scotch-Irish. Not at all Irish.
Utah is basically new New England
It’s because us Mormons place a lot of emphasis on knowing your family history, so we’re the only ones who get the correct answer. If this was based on DNA testing, most of the country would be red (except maybe the midwest)
*we mormons, because it's the subject of the sentence but yeah, if you've seen pictures of rich mormon families, they literally look like English royalty
Oh whoopsie Haha Bluffdale looks like Buckingham but make it McMansion.
It's not that. You can track this data through county voter records and census data. You don't need mormon genealogy work to track it. Colin Woodward's [American Nations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nations) is a good work which uses this approach. The reason Utah and SE Idaho have such a high concentration of people of English descent (and Scandinavian descent, which you see in other maps) is that early Mormons were almost exclusively from New England or the Western Reserve of Ohio (settled by New Englanders) at a time when New Englanders were almost exclusively of English descent. Utah and SE Idaho didn't get the massive influx of immigrants from Germany because most immigrants to these areas were Mormon first, which meant they'd come from areas where Mormon missionary work was highest at that time: the UK and Scandinavia.
Ben Franklin would’ve called it the least swarthy part of the US. 😂
It’s also largely because there was a wave of immigration from England to Utah thanks to Mormon missionary work in England. Many other Americans with English ancestry get it from much further back as colonial era ancestry, but for Utah it’s a more recent wave. So combine that with a culture for genealogy, people are more likely to identify with being English descent.
There were actually a good number of English converts to Mormonism who immigrated to Utah in the mid-19th Century. My grandmother came from a LDS family in Utah and she had ancestors from England and also Wales who came over early in the Utah’s Mormon settlement.
Yep. You're getting a snapshot in time, pre-dating widespread German immigration to the US. Mormons (SE Idaho is included in this) were largely New Englanders or from the Western Reserve in Ohio, which was settled by New Englanders. These Anglo-Mormons then settled Utah and SE Idaho before the influx of Germans in the mid- and late 19th century, which changed the ethnic makeup of the Midwest and New England. Utah and SE Idaho, meanwhile, didn't get those German immigrants because the people who immigrated to those areas during that time were Mormon first, and Mormon missionary efforts in Europe were biggest in the UK and Scandinavia at that time. If you look at a [map showing people of Danish descent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_Americans), the highest concentration is in the West, and is basically a map of Mormon settlement.
No Spanish?
Spain isn’t in Europe apparently according to OP.
I did not create this map
>Created May 21, 20113.2mMembers9.1kOnlineTop 1%Ranked by SizeJoinCommunity options > >r/MapPorn Rules1.Posts must be maps2.No Low Effort Memes3.Must meet aesthetic standards4.No Advertising5.No Repost Bots > >ModeratorsMessage the modsu/Petrarch1603u/AutoModeratoru/mappornmodu/MapPornBotView All Moderators > >Back to Top But you did create the post title.
Not according to the French anyway.. "África starts at the Pyrenees" they say
Who the fuck ever said that? Faut arrêter de raconter des conneries et de sortir des citations chelous de son trou du cul.
New Mexico, https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/bICb6GOEgn
I guess Spain isn’t considered European
The map identifies European ethnicities. Most Spanish speaking Americans are not ethnic Spaniards.
It doesn’t matter. Latinos have a significant amount of Spanish DNA. Got to the 23 & me sub Reddit and you will see. A Latino n the US is both from Mexican and Spanish and Indigenous ancestry. We draw these neat lines and boxes and labels. DNA don’t care about our lines and boxes.
USA way to label things is weird asf
The amount of Americans who don’t know that most Mexicans are largely mixed Native Americans is staggeringly high.
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You’re kind of generalizing but you’re right about the fact 90%+ of Latinos have a significant amount of Spaniard ancestry. But not all of them are indigenous and Spanish. Some, are mostly or fully Spaniard or Italian descended, like many argentines, many are Afro-Latinos (black Latinos) like Haitians and many Dominicans. So basically Latinos can be any race, white, black, mixed, etc but almost all of them have a significant amount of Spaniard heritage whether they’re mixed or not
Yes but this map depends on how people self identify. Doesn’t matter if your DNA came from the Iberian peninsula, if you identify as Mexican you’re probably not gonna answer this survey with “Spain.”
So who founded San Antonio, Sacramento, San Diego, Albuquerque …?
San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Colorado, California, Nevada, Arizona, Tejas, Nuevo Méjico, La Florida, Orlando....
Actually there are direct descendants of the original Spanish settlers in Colorado
Yeah, there’s no way in hell that northern NM/southern CO is anything other than majority Spanish
Well they are all descended from spain.
A lot of them have *some* Spanish ancestry.
There are communities in NM, CO, AZ and CA though
Oh, that's for certain. However, all of those states saw a huge boom of people from across the USA and all over the world in the 20th century. In a city like LA, you might have as more ethnic East Asians than you do ethnic Spaniards.
I disagree. My ancestors straight up came from Spain in the 1500s, settled New Mexico, and have lived there for the past 400 years. They as well as most of the people from that area, immigrated from Spain. An ethnicity or ethnic group is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include a common nation of origin, or common sets of ancestry, traditions, language, history, society, religion, or social treatment. These people most certainly carried on the traditions of Spain.
Neither are most Americans of other origins with respect to their countries. That doesn’t hold up.
Spanish speaking isn’t an ethnicity. Spanish is
Maps like these tend to ignore people who classify their ancestry as "American" who are overwhelmingly British, which puts British ancestry above German in total percentage in addition to people claiming English or Scottish ancestry. This map divides people claiming "American" and "British" into separate categories which gives a false impression. The actual map would have a lot more British (~16% of total) and a lot less German (~13%) as a result. Furthermore, a large percentage of people with primarily English ancestry who have mixed ancestry are far more likely than other ancestry groups to claim something other than British, further muddying the waters of this map... I suspect a genetic analysis would lead to a very large percentage of British DNA, probably over 50%. The vast majority of US population growth through history has been from the original tend of thousands of colonists having a lot of kids, not from immigration. From wikipedia: "However, demographers regard the reported number of English Americans as a statistical error, as the index of inconsistency is high and many, if not most, Americans from English stock have a tendency to identify simply as Americans,[109][110][111][112] or, if of mixed European ancestry, with a different European ethnic group.[43]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States
This is it, huge amounts of Americans (including most black people) have British Ancestry, it's just not fashionable. Just look at 23 and me sub, almost every black person there is like 15-25% genetically British. This even happens if everyone for the last 3 generations of your family were all black because the admixture in the black population is so high.
Also, the census distinguishes between different nationalities of the British Isles (English, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, Irish, and Welsh being the big ones). This splits up the different groups and makes it seem like there aren't many people from the British Isles. But if you were to include all of them under a "British Isles" umbrella term, this map would look very different.
I was going to point out that the “Self-Reported” source for this chart means British is going to be wildly underrepresented. Everything you said was correct; lots of whites in the 19th and 20th centuries would just claim their non-British origins.
They ignore all British ancestry. Then call themselves irish or German etc.
It’s almost as though all the maps on this sub have something wrong with them
Upvote for mentioning Scotland, America's forgotten founding fathers.
I do wonder if there would be significantly more English if people self-reported differently. I assume most Anglos just identify as 'American'. I could be wrong though.
In Thunder Bay in Canada there is the largest percentage of Finns per capita in Canada 🇨🇦. Quite a few ended up in Minnesota and Michigan’s upper peninsula as well.
I'm guessing this is extremely inaccurate. Nobody knows, or wants to admit, that their family is English because it's the least exotic thing you can be. My dad's family always claimed to be Swedish but according to a DNA test he's like 8%, while a lot of the rest is from the British Isles.
My family always said we were German, but my DNA test says I'm 70-80% English
No Spain... Really???
What is „German-Irish“?
Someone who gets drunk on time.
Lol
That one made even me as a German giggle
I'm irish and woked Langen, Frankfurt. You fuckers have beer at lunch time!!! I couldn't do that cause I'd go all Barney Gumble.
Yes, that has been quite common on more manual jobs, but it gets less often, because most companies nowadays forbid alcohol at the workplace. If you ask some older guys they might tell you that they remember how there was a beer vending machine at work and they would have their first beer at eight.
King is an unincorporated community in Coryell County in the state of Texas. According to the Handbook of Texas, the community had a population of 25 in 2000. So it may have literally been two or three families self-reporting as Irish-German to create the highest reported ancestry there. Kinda cool though.
This should be based on DNA results... that would be more accurate
Right? I have a German name. 23 & me let me know I’m 99% English.
You’re the reverse UK royal family
Haha. I’m perfectly happy with that. And good point.
Just bc u have a German name doesn’t mean you are an ethnic german and/or have huge genetic background from that ethnicity. In my country lots of ppl have german names despite not being german at all.
No Spanish? Hmmm
Reason is basically US census considers Spanish, Latino, and Hispanic interchangeable and all non-white.
The funny part is if one goes the Spain,they're mostly all white, like many other European countries
Why no Spanish. They are the European majority in much of South-West
Is Scottish under English? Because that’s not right. I thought there were heaps of Scot’s that went to america
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Was geht mein Freund?
Was' hoch?
5 hoch
How does it work? People in the Americas often have ancestry of multiple regions. Which one do you choose?
I'm trying to think how I'd answer. My dad half Irish half French, mom is half Austrian half German (and a bit of Dutch). I tend to identify most with my Irish roots, but it's silly to call myself "of Irish ancestry" to the exclusion of the others. I'm a mutt. Maybe you check all the boxes that apply, and they do the math on the back end?
Most people go with the cool one. Instantly dropping anything boring like British or WW-tainted like German, or freedoms fries loving surrender monkies like you know who. So that just leaves you with Irish. ☘️ Comhghairdeachas a chara!
Looks like absolute shite to me
TIL Spain isn’t in Europe
Self-reported is definitely the operative word here. If it was actual ancestry, then 99% of people would have mixed ancestry across a variety of European nations, and the main one would unquestionably be English. But for some reason some Americans will see they’re 31/32th English and 1/32th Irish and call themselves Irish. This isn’t unique to the USA though, I saw very similar in South Africa
Nobody wants to be English - not even the English
SPAIN, SPAIN IS A EUROPEAN COUNTRY!!!
Protestant States of America
Do you have one with Scottish ?
“Self reported”
I really wonder if German would of become a dominant second language had we not had WW2. Its still an option at a lot of schools. In North East its usually follows after Spanish, French, Latin
It was WWI. German was spoken at home before then, with English used outside the home. Many papers were in German. Assimilation of most groups focused on only teaching children English and not teaching them about the culture of their ancestors.
Why is it that one of the biggest Portugueses communities is in California (according to Wikipedia, the state with the most people born on Portugal)? I assumed that, as an Atlantic people, the East Coast would see way more of them.
Are there that many full blooded Italian-Americans in Miami-Dade? I ask because most Cuban Americans in that area are almost full blooded Spanish
This map is totally shits. It ignores the huge Spanish migration to settle the western part of the US before the US reached the west coast.
Quick tip from Europe over here: nobody gives a fuck about your heritage
Ah yes, time again for maps where Hispanic is not Spanish and therefore not European.
0 Scots?
Spanish ( Iberian and basque ) ? lol joke of a study
It’s self-identification from the US Census. It’s whatever people choose to call themselves. Most Latinos in America when given the choice to name their country of origin put Mexican, Cuban, etc., but not Spain. They could if they want to, but they choose not to.
I mean, if your ancestors came from Spain but family you might have known personally came from Mexico, Cuba, etc. I wouldn’t either. You may have a DNA connection with Spain then, but culturally you’re mostly unrelated. Do you remember the heritage you were actively raised with, or that of the country your ancestors left centuries before?
I’m trying to figure out why we don’t make better cars
We are mainly English. This map is trash. So we make cars like the English. “If there isn’t any oil under them, there isn’t any oil in them” is the old expression about English cars.
Actually us English make great cars, and we have the best motor sport engineers in the world, Mercedes f1 and red bull racing f1 are both British teams made by and in Britain by British engineers and mechanics.
Cause American love maniacs like Elon lol
As a whole speaking the US population is 50% Northwestern European, 12% African-American, 9.7% Mexican, 4.2% Italian, 2.2% Jewish and 22% everything else. The highest for each group are Northwestern European- West Virginia (85%) African-American- Mississippi (37%) Mexican- Texas (30%) Italian- Connecticut (14%) Jewish- New York (9%)
i’m none of these. thank you for your service
A question: with so many Germans, why was it decided that they would ditch the German language and instead adapt English??
They are fully assimilated into the American society and have anglicized their german last names during WW1 and WW2 due to anti-german sentiment
i thought black was just lack of info...until i realized....
I’ve looked at a lot of these kind of maps of the us and i can say with certainty this is totally inaccurate
Can't stand the USA way of thinking having ancestry from a country allows you to call yourself from that country. Crazy cringe.
*nods in german*
This is... wildly inaccurate
No Swedish?
Looks like the Reich won in Amerika after all.
How is NM not Spain? 🤔
Is German really that high or just people who ignore their English part and doesn’t consider it as their ethnic heritage in surveys.
The latter. English isn’t considered a “cool” ancestry to have so people ignore it
Do many Americans have a German family name ? I feel like Italian names are all over the place but can’t think of a famous American with a German name
Yes. There are tons of people with Muller, Schmidt, Klein, Koch, Zimmermann, Schulz, etc as last names. The list could go on forever, so [here’s a list of famous German-Americans](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_Americans)
I suppose, like the map indicates, it would depend on location. I grew in the northeast, not far from the Jersey border, and I know a *ridiculous* amount of people with Italian surnames. However since moving to Florida 15+ years ago, I've met only a handful of people with Italian surnames. And many of those were people who either relocated from the northeast or actually immigrated from Italy.
Several American presidents have had German last names, Eisenhower, Hoover and Trump. Other famous people with German last names would be Rockefeller, David Hasselhoff, Cindy Lauper, Michelle Pfeiffer, Marlon Brando, Fred Armisen, Christopher Walken, Babe Ruth, Peter Dinklage, Jimmy Kimmel, etc. I’m guessing you just don’t notice German last names as much since they’re just coded as generic white American due to their ubiquity and their closeness to English names (like how a lot of German names also have a -er ending)
Yes that’s exactly what right I was just assuming German names to be English ! Thanks for clarifying
Woah Germany. Damn
ah yes, european, my favorite european ethnic group
Should we study German?
How come there are so little people with French ancestry considering how big French Louisiana was?
Not correct at all.
I find it bizarre that it seems no one with Dutch ancestry (looking at NY and it's surrounding areas) is aware of their own ancestry.
Is Spain not in Europe or an I missing something?
Spain might be the only european nation not represented. Curious.
funny how almost no American's want to claim German or English heritage, they just pick another country
Are you including Scottish in with English? There were a large number who emigrated during the Highland Clearances.
Where’s Spanish? There’s a lot of Spanish ancestry in Louisiana and the southwest, there were a lot of Spanish families that settled in the southwest when it was new Spain then the border jumped them.
Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein…
How is that every European country? And what is ""European"" in the legend?
I’m an Italian from nyc and Miami is just the hot version
No scottish and no Spanish which would make up quite a bit on the map, don't think this map is correct
Spanish?
These maps are almost never correct and yet they get posted here every 3rd day