To ask if you have 4 British Grandparents?

[ThornInMySide84]

In conversation with friends last night about the perks of still having an EU passport I discovered I was the only one with all 4 Grandparents being British.

DH also has 1 non British Grandparent and now when I really think about it so do a lot of my other friends. I would say the majority have an Irish Grandparent but also Spanish, Indian, Chinese, Polish, Maltese and Italian amongst my close friends.

I recall reading somewhere that 25% of British people could get an Irish passport so I guess I’m now wondering if having all 4 British Grandparents are not being entitled to any other nationality is actually quite uncommon?

Yes, it's pretty typical outside of cities and big towns.
It's pretty standard for British people to have some degree of Irish heritage too, even if they don't have a grandparent or parent literally born in Ireland.

Makes perfect sense.
You're proud to be British but it would be nice to have a foreign leaf on the tree.

For the record I am one of four British grandparents and possess a solidly British heritage. All the way back to 1795. There was this ancestor with a Continental sounding name to find out he came from bloody Canterbury.

Absolutely nothing wrong with this fair city, but my hopes were well and truly dashed. Although, Mum's of North London stock and anywhere south of the water ....

I did have. All Scottish even. And my own parents and DHs parents are/were all Scottish too.

I had 3/4 British grandparents. My grandmother was from an EU country but sadly I am not eligible for a passport through her for various technical reasons.

I, technically have four British Grandparents, my parents were born before 1922 so could have elected to have a British or Irish passport and my grandparents were born in Ireland and England well before the turn of the 20th Centrury.

My British passport recently expires, so I am thinking long and hard about whether I should get an Irish Passport.

I had 2 English grandparents, one Scottish and one German (but born in Poland I believe). I'm in my 30s.

DH's GPs were all British.

I have two who were certainly British and two who probably were possibly could have been Irish. I don't even know how I would begin to find out.

Yep and so dies not husband, I think most of my friends also fall in that category too.

Oh honey. I can understand you felt intimidated. Please keep your necklace on though if you feel able to. You have nothing to hide. Big hugs 💐

2 Irish and 2 English

DD once did a class project about migration - she was one of only 2 kids in her London class of 30 who had four British (not Irish) grandparents and therefore no tale of significant migration in her recent family history.

at Catholic school we did this exercise once, only 1 child in the class had all 4 grandparents born in the UK (it wasn't me)

My DM was Italian, but I couldn't get dual nationality because Italian war brides had to renounce their nationality when they came to the UK. More recently she could have regained it, but couldn't be bothered, then died. I'm still a bit salty about it!

All my adoptive grandparents are British. One of my biological grandparents is Eastern European.

Three British and one who knows, we only discovered he’d been using a fake identity all his life after he died so don’t even know his birth name let alone nationality.

I only had 1 British grandparent.

Lost all mine by the age of 12 but yes they were...

Had members of the family trace both sides of the family tree - dad back to around 1760 and mum 1830 - the biggest move was from Essex to Durham, and my dads side pretty much farmed the same land for those hundreds of years.

No wonder I'm such a home bird!

No. Not Irish though. I do live in a (small) town where its fairly common though. Hell, it's bizarrely (to me) common to have your grandparents living in/ from this town.

Two UK, two NZ, so I have both passports. Very grateful.

I have grandparents that divorced and remarried, so 6 in total. All British.

All British, one GP was Scottish but i don't think have any Irish relatives as far as I know. My friend has an Indian father who came to UK as young man but they've a British passport and I don't think he had much contact with Indian relatives for them to visit.

I did, although they all died in the 70s and 80s.

All British and from the same town. My father in law is a scouser and I think that’s quite exotic.

I’m early 40s and all 4 of my grandparents are British. My husband also has 4 British grandparents. I have to go to my great great grandparents to find a non British one (Irish). On my husband’s side he hasn’t found anyone who isn’t British (or more specifically not English) having gone back several generations. I have quite a few friends who have an Irish grandparent (I was brought up catholic so that probably skews the sample a bit) but many who have 4 British grandparents too.

Yes and so has DW and our DCs