Foreign ancestry

[user23974865]

3 hours ago, chandrakirti said:

My DNA was boringly Scots/Northern Europe/Norwegian bit a miniscule amount was ...indigenous American! How?

Maybe Inuits captured by Vikings? Maybe some other very-unlikely-but-true story. I guess a minor glitch in their statistical methods is always a possibility too.

[Anthracite_Impreza]

The Vikings settled in Greenland for a while, it's pretty likely some people got it on with the "exotic" other race

 

I am an extremely boring, white, thoroughly English Yorkshireman. I'm almost certainly part Viking and Irish cos we Northerners usually are, but not in known history.

[Divide By Zero]

I've lived in Canada all my life. My parents are originally from the United States. They immigrated to Canada in the early 1970s, fleeing the Nixon presidency. My Dad was drafted in the late 1960s for the Vietnam War (I think it was 1967) and he had planned on going to Canada to dodge the draft but he managed to find a medical reason to avoid service. However, it got him thinking about the possibility of immigrating to Canada and the seed was planted.

 

I don't see myself as being different because my parents are American and I don't think others perceive me as different. I think it's due to a combination of having lived in Canada all my life and that so many people have parents who immigrated to Canada.

 

Going further back in time, most of my ancestors emigrated from Europe to the United States in the early 1800s (1820s to 1850s), although there are a few branches of the family that go way back and came over before the American Revolution. There are also a couple of branches that came over after the Civil War. My ancestry is a jumble of English, Welsh, Scottish, Dutch, German, Czech, and Polish. The ancestry from the British Isles is quite interesting because people moved around a lot. I have a Scottish ancestor who left Scotland and moved to England in the early 1700s, a couple of years after the union (which was 1707). He married an English woman and they settled in London. The Welsh ancestors left Wales in the 1700s and settled in western England. There is a branch of the family that came from what is now Northern Ireland and they were descendants of English settlers and Ulster Scots. Another branch of the family left England in the 1700s and went to Barbados (a British colony) and then in the 1800s moved to the United States.

[Goonie]

way boring here. multiple generations back for foreign ancestry

[Tree snake]

I'm Sami. 
And half German and tracing my ancestry back I can pretty much incorporate every single country in Europe. 

 

When I was in kindergarten I had a teacher who would refer to me by derogatory slurs used on people of my heritage. I didn’t understand it back then but I remember all hell broke loose when my dad found out.

[Larkaloke]

My oma was Austrian, and my mother grew up speaking German and visiting Austria sometimes in the summers. I learned German myself, later; I'm reasonably fluent (I can carry on a conversation, read quite well albeit slowly, write decently well, and usually understand things I listen to), but I've never spoken it around the house, although I did read children's books in German when I visited my grandparents as a kid and my oma often used German phrases. I never felt different because of this, not surprisingly, although I know that my mom didn't speak German as often as she might have because she was afraid of being teased. Since I knew my oma really well and heard plenty of things about Austria, I feel fairly connected to that side of the family. She was an amazing cook, and a lot of my favourite foods to this day are things that she used to make. My oma and opa also tended to keep a more typically European schedule, as did my family, and I still get surprised when people eat at the typical American dinner time.

 

On the other side, my great-grandfather (who I never met) was Welsh. The majority of the rest of my family comes from either Wales or Germany, but that's all fairly distant. I am trying to learn Welsh, but that's more because I've always found it an interesting language than because of relatives.

 

People do typically seem to see me as different, and "where are you from" and "what accent do you have" are questions I've had frequently for my whole life despite having never moved more than about 20 miles, but I don't think this has anything to do with foreign ancestry.

[XYZ96]

1) I was born in the States, but I live in Germany and have since I was 11. My parents were born in Canada, my Grandparents on one side where both born in Germany

 

2) Kind of, my mom wanted my brother and me to learn German, because we're German, but the main reason I learned German is because I moved to Germany, though the reason I moved to Germany and not some other country was because I'm German, so I'm not entirely sure what to answer. (also, at my parents and relatives places only English is spoken)

 

3) No

 

4) I sometimes get viewed a little different because I was born in a different country instead of Germany, but in the country that I was born (USA), I have no ancestry, so I'm not sure if this counts...

[iff]

This poll is being locked and moved to the read only Census archive for it's respective year. As part of ongoing Census organisation, and in an attempt to keep the demographics of the polls current with the active user base at the time, the polls will last for one year from now on. However, members are allowed and even encouraged to restart new polls similar to the archived ones if they like them.

  

iff, Census Forum Moderator