To wonder when Americans lose their roots

[categorychaos]

Curious to know (especially from US Mumsnetters) but when do Americans stop referring to themselves as having heritage from where their forefathers came from?

Whenever I read a bio on someone famous reference is often made to their roots - so for example German, French, Scots, Irish, French, etc..

Along with a fair number of people I have heritage stretching back to different cultures/places but after a few generations I would not refer to myself as Irish or French and it wouldn't tend to crop up anywhere outside of genealogy

Is there a reason they do it so much in the USA or am I mistaken in that assumption?

Same with my DH @DulciUke, far too many hyphens!

Not quite - we are very close to chimpanzees too, after all, but that makes no difference at all when it comes to our feelings for certain patches of land, or a musical tradition or accent or turn of phrase, or the Proustian feelings inspired by a certain culinary tradition, or what makes the World Cup or the Olympics interesting for us.

The interest in ancient DNA is more of an academic one.

Not particularly. There’s a whole science devoted population genetics and genomics, for example which helps map and understand the genetic diversity within and between different populations which includes ancestry and migration patterns. This in turn sheds light on medical issues relating to genetic aspects of health and disease,

Equally, theres a whole world of people out there getting their dna tested interested in genealogies of their families and of wider populations.

if they are white, they are unlikely to have anything but north European heritage since southern Europeans came very late and tended to stay urban and endogamous. Catholicism used to be the sticking point, so you’d have a lot of Irish and Italians intermarrying (and later with Polish too)

This changed somewhat after WW2 but you still generally have to convert to Catholicism to marry in that community (unless you’ve lapsed)

Nah, they’re in there. The Schmidts would rather they weren’t.

And you know this how?

One of them did an in-depth genealogical investigation. Many of the family were less than thrilled with what was documented.

The various ethnicities among the Catholic population tended not to intermarry until after WW2. This was partly because of the unifying effect among men of serving in the armed forces and getting to know people they normally wouldn't have mingled with. Then the growth of the new suburbs (thanks to the GI Bill and the post war building boom) meant people who wouldn't have entered each other's city neighborhoods became neighbours.

Northern Europeans are a disparate lot - Scandinavians, Poles, Baltic peoples, Dutch, and Germans / Prussians, and Jews from all those places are very distinct in terms of language and religion, and again, only mixed after WW2. Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles who are more recent immigrants have more in common than they are often prepared to admit, and immigrants from all over northern and eastern Europe who lived under Communist regimes have more in common with each other than with their western compatriots regardless of strength of feeling against communism.

What I'm getting at is what stirs the blood and contributes to people saying they're Italian American. What you're describing is a more dry and less personally relevant side to genetics. I'm not saying it doesn't have relevance, just not in a way that makes people in Pittsburgh who are four fenerations removed from Sicily cheer on the Italian guy who won the 100 meters in Tokyo, and get all misty eyed when they watched the medal ceremony.

The various ethnicities among the Catholic population tended not to intermarry until after WW2.

@mathanxiety Yes, it may have been uncommon, but it did sometimes happen. I mentioned upthread that when DH’s grandparents married, their wider families had to communicate through the children as they didn’t speak much English. That was in the 1930’s.

What could be more personally relevant than dna? Why do you think people worldwide are getting DNA tests to identify their heritage and constructing family trees on ancestry? There are whole forums of people waiting for the latest ancestry updates to see if their % of Italian has increased or decreased - are they more or less Italian than yesterday? And unfortunately forums dedicated to people who have discovered their parentage or grandparentage was not what they thought: their father/grandfather was not Italian at all but Mexican.

What dna tells you about your ancestry goes to the core of your identity and geographical, historical and social connections.

No, I think that the stories people tell themselves about their heritage are what is key, otherwise you wouldn’t have the forums you mention, where people discover that the story of their heritage isn’t the one that they or their family had been telling for generations, and that the family myths are just that, unfounded.

The first episode I ever saw of Who Do You Think You Are was John Hurt’s — he loved Ireland, had lived there, had a brother who had converted to Catholicism and was a monk in a monastery in Limerick, and JH was very strongly attached to the idea that he had Irish ancestry via a family story that his great-grandmother had been an illegitimate daughter of the Marquess of Sligo. He was gutted to discover it wasn’t true. That’s what I remember from the programme, not even just that an actor I admired was visibly disappointed, but that this story about his ancestry had really mattered to him and been a key feature of who he thought he was.

@Mushrump It’s not either/or is it. Of course family history and narratives are important to identity, I have never said they weren’t. But modern genealogy and dna has shown up how inaccurate they can be.

I think you may have misinterpreted my point: I am not saying your genealogy dna is the most important aspect of your identity - apart from everything else it’s an imprecise science based on estimates, databases and algorithms; I was responding to the PP’s view that dna was of dry academic interest only and less of personal relevance.

I think you've just proved my point there.

People send their cheek cells off in cardboard envelopes to try to establish a connection they feel they may have, or to validate stories they have been told. In essence, they are seeking a sense of personal identity, a sense of belonging to some specific heritage, a sense of belonging somewhere they can visit and experience, a sense of knowing who they are.

By contrast, knowledge of the region your paternal or maternal haplogroup originated in isn't as personally pertinent. You're carrying maternal mitochondria that arose in the Caucusus many, many thousands of years ago, but there isn't a little pile of stones on a windswept hillside in Connemara that once was a house, or a moss covered tombstone, or an entry in a parish register that offers you a tangible token of a life you can and possibly do imagine, a life you may have heard stories about from a dear departed relative.

Yes indeed.
I think WW2 was a period of nation building in the US thanks to the enormous mobilisation and shared experience of warfare, war work, and the rise of loyalty to an idea of what America stood for in the world, with the sentimental art of Norman Rockwell hammering home a message of what the American identity consisted of. (It echoed a corresponding trend in Soviet art).

What Schmidts? Me? My heritage is German, but I call myself an American.

Agree with all this : re Poles, Ukrainians & Russians though, it's true that they have much in common culturally.

Pretty big divides surely though, back when Russian occupation of both was ongoing, and Ukranians and Poles had a history of mutual violence including during WW2. Obviously we know how bad Russian's attitude is to the other countries now...and there is still a lot of tension between Poles & Ukranians despite the war solidarity.

Plus Ukranians & Russians are mainly Orthodox, while Poles are usually Catholic.

My in-laws. Well, some of them.

Ah I didn’t know that. I meet so many Irish-Italians that I did not consider it was a more recent thing lol.

Generally when you marry a Catholic you are pressured to convert. But not the other way around because to US Protestants, Catholicism is just another variant of Christianity, not ‘the church’ so to speak. So no need to ‘convert’

@mathanxiety No I haven’t. We have different perspectives and you can only understand your own. And that’s fine.

I wonder if they're related to me. Not that Schmidt is an uncommon name. My family settled in Cincinnati from Germany.