re: Why do so many southern areas refer to themselves as americans on ancestry surveys?

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The midwest, the west, the northeast.....all answer it like you'd expect. Where your ANCESTORS LEFT to come here./

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My ancestors weren't racist they left from lots of places and got it on with whoever.

USA.

Yankee carpetbagger much?

I'll answer your question with more questions.

Why do people from Cuba refer themselves as Cuban? Many of their families came from Europe and only stayed in Cuba for 2 or 3 generations.

Why do people from Mexico refer to themselves as Mexican?

Having considered those two questions, why is it odd to refer to yourself as American if your family has been in America for 7+ generations?

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they are asking which region of the world your original immigrant families came from.

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they came from Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

If a girl with a vagina can say that she is a boy, why in the frick can't I say "I identify with being a mother frickin' American?"

So my last name is Spanish or Portuguese. But I also have French, German and Native American that I know of. My daughter recently had her DNA tested and very little from the regions of Spain or Portugal showed up, no Native American ( despite the fact that her maternal great great grandmother was half Cherokee). Lots of English and German and about 1% sub Saharan Africa ( who knew). What should she check? How about American?

A lot of us do not live in homogeneous communities.

Just going by my last name, you could claim German or French as my ancestors immigrated from a German speaking area of France that has changed hands numerous times.

This then totally disregards my Spanish, Polish, Ukrainian, Irish, and other European ancestry.

Because southerners don't worry about the ancestry of who they marry. Thus, they aren't a majority of any particular ancestral group. What are you going to answer when you are 10% Irish, 10% Scottish, 10% German, 10% English, and part African and Indian to boot?

In the northeast especially, and other parts of the USA, Italians marry Italians, Jews marry Jews, and Poles marry Poles.

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What are you going to answer when you are 10% Irish, 10% Scottish, 10% German, 10% English, and part African and Indian to boot?

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Bingo!


Also, notice that it has “African American” and not just “African”. Makes no sense.

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I wonder why you're offended people identify with a country that's existed since 1776 but you have no problem that far more people identify as German when that country has only existed since 1871.



(For those who don't know shite about history, before the founding of The German Empire in January 1871, the people who lived in what we now consider "Germany" were far more likely to identify with whatever area (like Barvaria, Saxony, Prussia, etc) they lived in than as "German". So in other words, people have been calling themselves "American" almost 100 years longer than they've been calling themselves Germans.)

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The people of that region have been called Germans since the Middle Ages and the time of the Holy Roman Empire. It's no different than someone calling themselves a Louisianan and an American.

My ancestors (of only one line) immigrated from England to America about 300 years ago. About 700 years before that they went from Normandy to England when William invaded and conquered the country. Before that who knows where they came from. There are some rumors that they were Roman settlers in the north of modern day France. I'm sure along the way they mixed with all kinds of different "ancestry."

At what point does trying to claim ancestry from a single place become completely meaningless? Because trying to claim my ancestry as being English seems completely meaningless to me. Maybe I claim Scotch-Irish because that's what my ancestors probably mixed the most with spending most of the last 300 years in the American South? I don't know. That seems pretty meaningless too. I'm American.