To wonder when Americans lose their roots

People go on about it here now though

It didn't used to be so bad

But now I find heritage and skin colour or a virtual obsession. I was out this evening and had it again. Being asked questions about a country I've never been to. Annoying.

I've done quite a lot of work over in the US and I feel as if it's the same there in the sense that I didn't find people talking a lot about heritage 20 years ago.

I'm obviously just talking about my own experience, I'm one person but that's what I see.

I lived in the US for the best part of 10yrs. As soon as they realised I wasn’t American I got their full story. Dear God, they all bang in about it, lol

My great-grandparents emigrated from Norway and Denmark to the US. We know what towns most of them came from, have photos from the 1880s of some of the people who came over, and a few who stayed, and some of us have gone back to visit over the years. Even though this is now at least 120 years since these wave of late 19th century post-Civil War immigrants came to the Midwest and Pacific Coast, it's still a whole thing to keep the idea of their roots alive. We have food, stores, celebrations, festivals, associations, churches, etc. that still celebrate this heritage. We fly the Norwegian flag on Syttende Mai. The Norwegian crown prince just visited one of our sister cities in the US this last week. My grandma's wedding and baptism were conducted in Danish. I have clippings from Danish-language and Norwegian-language newspapers in the US that family members kept. Scandinavian language camps in my city are always overbooked.

For fun, we did 23andme and it accurately noted that 80% of my heritage came from the exact places my ancestors told us they came from. The rest came from 'general Northern European'. I was hoping for some interesting, unknown background might pop up, but nobody was lying, I'm ethnically Scandinavian.

My parents were very liberal in the 1970s/80s and told us we could marry anyone of any background/race. But I fell in love with a man whose entire family came from Norway, so our kids joke that they are more Norwegian than the Norwegian Royal Family.

I think it’s really unique to the UK and our weirdness that we don’t know how to suggest who is from what constituent nation and where we “belong” so it comes down to accent or where you live. My mother is Scottish and I was born in Scotland but grew up in England, and likewise I would never ever claim to be Scottish because I never lived there and I haven’t got a Scottish accent. But it’s funny…this is why when they did the Indyref they couldn’t specify in any way who would be “Scottish enough” to vote so it came down to residence.

Yes I’ve always found that to be particularly strange with Americans. Especially as they often tend to know very little about the country that they are claiming to have ancestry from, and it’s unlikely that they’ve ever been there.

I live in New Zealand where obviously the majority of the population has heritage from somewhere else, and in many cases only going back a couple of generations … but people don’t go on about it the way Americans do.

I quite like like you still feel a connection with your ancestors and where they came from. Scottish settlers influenced a lot of language and culture in certain regions, the history of it all is so interesting.

May I ask how it was for you when you stayed in Scotland, did you feel a connection of sorts?

Genuinely can’t tell if this is serious?! Surely not.

Genuinely can’t tell if this is serious?! Surely not.

I have never said that I am Scottish. Why don't you take a closer read of my posts?

@CarolinaInTheMorningmy actual great granddad is from a Central American country. I don’t claim to be that plus British. It’s a hell of a reach to claim you are Scottish.

It annoyed me when Joe Biden refused to speak to the BBC because he “was Irish”. I have the same number of Irish ancestors he does, plus the freckles, blue eyes, Catholicism and Irish surname and I’d never, ever describe myself as Irish. He’s just a plastic paddy and having an axe to grind with the British whilst in a position of power was petty and irresponsible.

My mum's uncle moved to America from Ireland in the 1920's. I remember chatting with her cousin when we visited and her being so pleased that she had married an Irish man and her children had also married Irish-Americans. They wanted their kids to marry Irish too.

I'm Scottish of predominantly Irish ancestry, at home I identify somewhat as Irish-Scots and Irish Catholic but when I go to Ireland I realise I am really a Scot now and that Ireland doesn't really feel like home to me in some mystical way! I do like it but I prefer Scotland.

The entire Irish tourist industry depends on this obsession so as an Irish person I'd say long may it last!

I agree @XWKD the Irish American thing is bizarre at first. Then I realised they are their own sub culture and my bewilderment at their strong identity is no different to bewilderment towards any other culture. I recently met up with a distant cousin in the US, our parents were close friends, she couldn't fathom that I didn't know her other cousins (same side so same relationship) who live less than 2 hours from me. I tried to explain that we basically didn't give a shit!! She couldn't believe it.

This is intriguing.

Both of my parents are Scottish and I don’t consider myself Scottish.

In fact, they take the piss out of me for being English.

Scottish American is not the same as Scottish and American. My nationality and citizenship is American. My national origin (a term of art in the US and a legally protected status) makes me Scottish-American.

The point that a poster made about church affiliation is also important. Cultural identity is often reinforced in the US by religious affiliation.

A Scottish-American is an American whose ancestors were Scottish immigrants. Because emigrants came in groups they brought their cultural with them, and came at a particular time in America’s evolution. They split from Scotland about 300 years ago and developed along a separate track with their own unique culture. So very different from today’s Scotts.

Scottish Americans are pretty cool. They were frontiersmen who landed in a new world while it was pretty wild, they settled the west, fought at the Alamo, pushed onto California and then went to the moon. They are known to be independent, self reliant, principled, up for a drink and up for a fight. I suspect a lot of them would idolise their distant cousins in Scotland and be bemused once they met them!

Not Scottish, but Scottish - American

😂

Romanticism

I wasn’t meaning to be rude I was just surprised.

is Scottish American not the same as Scottish and American? A Scottish American?

If your ancestors from the 1700s are roughly about 8 to 10 generations back, on average you would inherit a very small percentage of their DNA typically less than 1% from any one ancestor that far back.

This is because with each generation, the DNA you inherit halves from each ancestor. For example, you get about 50% from each parent, 25% from each grandparent, 12.5% from great-grandparents, and so on, decreasing roughly by half each generation.

By the time you reach ancestors from the 1700s, the share of DNA you carry from any one of them is usually quite tiny due to the random way DNA is shuffled and inherited over generations.

It's one of those things that Americans are well known for that I don't get, while being American.

I know there are dozens of US organisations about linking to how people arrived pre-War of Independence. It's a whole thing some are very proud and make a big part of their family or community identity.

I grew up in the US in a place and time when it wasn't really talked about. It just wasn't done, my father's side didn't at all, and my mother's side only in vague remarks that sounded more like guesses. The most I got was 'Yeah, we're a mix', but that in itself was in response to someone saying 'You look like a mongrel' - a guess based on looks, nothing specific heritage wise. I got the impression that digging into it was viewed as divisive.

I think it's one of those things that where the ones who do are really easy to spot, but there are also those who never talk about, families and communities try to be 'just American' as quickly as possible - or at least cutting off and being quiet about a few branches they don't want to talk about. I know there is writing on immigrants a few decades back who did not pass on their language in the thinking that their kids should focus on English and assimilating & the different ways their kids as adults have felt on that - some embraced that, and others have gone looking.

It's weird how differently this is viewed. I have one (black) Jamaican grandparent, 3 white grandparents from England and Wales. I'd feel like a fraud identifying as Jamaican. Tbh I feel judged even identifying as mixed race because I don't look especially black - more sort of middle Eastern. And I even used to live in Jamaica as a kid (no accent now though)

White Americans generally know when their family went over. Black Americans who have been there for far more generations, don't, for obvious reasons. I wonder how much racism to blame for the emphasis that white Americans put on their family origin, having a sense of history that was deliberately denied to the enslaved people.

Bit rude! She didn’t say Scottish, she said Scottish-American.

It’s relevant to other Americans. A Scottish American will have a subtle difference from an Italian American etc. The Scotts were mostly Presbyterians who emigrated to America 200 years before the Southern Italians who will be Catholics who arrived into an urban context rather than a wilderness. Just as an example.