The whole ethnic identity is mostly to identify where in the world you ethnically originated from to other Americans. Because almost every single person in the US is either an immigrant, or a descendent of one. So we identify to each other where we came from as Americans.
Where people go wrong with this is if they happen to be traveling internationally and take this US centric identity with them. If traveling internationally, you could be ethnically from the place you are traveling. But in that context, you’d be American. This is a part of that whole well traveled awareness thing.
The genealogy thing is their curiosity in tracing that ethnic origin with greater detail. I personally don’t find it too interesting myself, but different strokes.
Edit: I’d like to add, this is mostly in case other people reading this thread are wondering why this is even a thing. It’s truly an annoying behavior.
Really, I think a far more charitable (and common) instance of this is an american, say, travelling to Ireland and noting that they actually have Irish heritage. And then some nice local appreciates their interest and they have something to talk about. American tourists these days don’t seem any more annoying or tone deaf than, say German, Israeli, or UK tourists. If you encounter a tourist off the beaten path, then they are almost always polite, curious, and a very nice person. And if you are hanging out where the big bus tourists congregate… well, what did you expect? They are dumbasses fishing for selfies - the lowest common denominator doesnt differentiate based on nationality.
You’re not wrong, this is totally a thing. I’m a euro mutt (I coin for myself) and I can trace some lines.
It’s because were all immigrants in a young country. Even the census we take asks where we hail from. I’ve maked “American” on it the last two times. It is a deal here, and yes it can be annoying especially when you get the tropes going. “Oh my family is Italian we like big families” mean while I’m fourth gen Italian (mixed obvs) and like what, are you inbreeding to stay Italian? Your husbands last name is “smith” like, fuck off. My full first gen Italian great grandmother married a first gen polack and had one kid. One. Fuck off with your stereotypes. This bitch I’m thinking of feed her kids all the american processed foods, give no fucks about the quality of her food ingredients or where they come from, just fuck off “were Italian” bitch shut up.
Yep. And so many white people here claim native ancestry. “I’m 1/16th Cherokee” they’ll say. Usually it is Cherokee because that’s the group their parents or grandparents had heard of and told them. I think it comes from trying to absolve the guilty feelings of what the settlers did to the natives.
The genealogy conversations are just tiring and predictable.
So many! I think it was possibly, a almost pop culture trend in the 70s to claim native history tbh. So many folks I met who do this would have been teens/young adults in that time. But you’re probably right, it’s some warped cope for the atrocities committed against native people. Fucking warped.
Potentially annoying American here with a point of clarification: is it annoying just to be interested in one’s heritage, or is it Americans that make that heritage their entire personality?
I think a lot of it stems from living in a relatively young, immigration heavy, multicultural country and the little conversations that arise from that.
At least in the city I grew up and still live in I have met a lot of people who either immigrated or whose parents immigrated from other countries. In high school human geography I learned it takes a couple generations for an immigrant family to fully assimilate into a new culture, so a lot of these first/second generation immigrants still have connections and traditions from their family’s old country. The history of those countries (or at least the regions modern countries occupy) stretch back hundreds to thousands of years. I think many caucasian Americans, often raised to be competitive, want that sense of history when comparing to their own family but American culture has “only” developed over the past 300-400 years. To get an older/deeper sense of heritage they have to ask where their ancestors that immigrated to the US immigrated from, and because a sense of superiority is at least some part of American culture that older heritage has to be better than the other older heritages and therefore something to be loud and proud about. Even if it isn’t actually a big part of one’s life.
All that to say yes I think you’re right about it being a matter of ethnic distinction, which I think is brought about by the circumstances of US history. I definitely get how it’s annoying.
I’m an immigrant in the U.S. When my accent gives me away, I’m often asked where I’m from, which somehow leads to the discovery that the other person is also Irish. Or Scottish. Usually Irish.
I’m not offended so much as confused. “I am Irish” carries an expectation of shared culture and experience. When that’s clearly not what’s being offered, it lands less as connection and more hollow. Offense arises when clichés or affected accents appear. That’s no longer about identity; it’s just being an eejit.
I’ve always understood it to be a remnant of a culture that de-emphasized genealogy and family pedigree, and had a lot more cultural and ethnic mixing in marriages at an earlier era. In Europe, it seems like there are a lot more family crests and aristocratic titles, from centuries of families maneuvering for political power through strategic marriages and what not, and stronger cultural taboos against marrying and having children outside of one’s ethnic group (and religion), at least up until maybe World War II.
So if there’s just less to learn from DNA testing (a person who happens to already have records of all 16 of their great-great-grandparents, who all lived in the same geographical area), I’d expect there not to be much demand for that kind of analysis.
Or maybe I’m wrong to focus on the gentry and aristocratic families, and have a misplaced view of how long that kind of stuff culturally persisted in Europe.
“germans”, “french”, “danes” weren’t a thing. up until recently. they are genetically diverse groups.
I was under the impression that the DNA kits described actual ethnic groups and showed a map of the distribution of those groups overlaid on modern political borders or region names. Here’s the page on 23 and Me’s reports, which have a lot more granular detail, mapped onto modern political borders for reference, but where any listed nation or territory may have up to dozens of different sub-groups listed.
And I also wonder how the machines that create these results even manage to distinguish between, say, English and Welsh “genes”. I mean sure, there’s some science behind it. 0.1% to be precise.
maybe clearing this up:
germany has a hereditary citizenship. i. e. children of germans can get a german passport.
being “german” means owning german citizenship (or citizenship of the one of the former constructs the federal republic sees as its precursors), not owning a set of genes. you can have no ‘distinct european genes’ (e.g. be ainu?) at all and get citizenship for your kids, as long as you have it. you can be “genetically german” and still don’t have a passport.
It typically doesn’t. Most countries don’t care about where your ancestors came from. Being fluent in the local language and culture will generally give you a leg up if you already qualify for immigration so I hope your family kept those alive (and not Americanized versions like Irish-Americans wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day). But your ancestry is usually completely irrelevant.
Those genetic test results absolutely don’t mean anything. If you’re culturally American with an American passport, you’re American and that’s it.
Kind of funny you specifically call out Irish-Americans, because Ireland does actually have some options for citizenship-by-descent. It’s not quite as simple as anyone with Irish ancestry can become a citizen, but it is a thing.
If you have a grandparent who was born in Ireland you’re eligible
Or if your parent was an Irish citizen at the time of your birth
So hypothetically if you have a great grandparent born in Ireland, your parent could apply for Irish citizenship, even though their parents (your grandparents) weren’t citizens and had never set foot in Ireland
And if they did that before you were born you would also be eligible
And so on down the line to your children, and their children, etc. if everyone keeps on top of it.
There’s actually a decent handful of countries with some sort of citizenship-by-descent, not a majority by a longshot, and of course every country that does offer it has different requirements and restrictions, but for some people it can potentially be a viable pathway to another citizenship.
i am not going to verify what you said, but regardless of if it is true, if your grandparents have the citizenship, you probably don’t need dna test to find that out…
It’s absolutely an edge case, but there are still a lot of wonky family situations out there, people who are estranged from their family for any number of reasons, adoption, people raised by their grandparents under the impression that they were their parents to hide the fact that their sister is really their mom and they were hiding a teen pregnancy, your mom cheated and your dad isn’t actually your father, etc.
And sometimes that all stays under wraps until someone in the family takes a DNA test.
I have a friend with a big family who just recently discovered that most of her aunts and uncles aren’t actually her grandfather’s biological children. She and her siblings haven’t done a test themselves and her father’s dead so the jury is still out on whether she’s blood related to him or not.
But if she’s not, and she finds out who her actual biological grandfather is, it’s not impossible that that may open up a new pathway to citizenship through him.
And laws change, as a hypothetical, let’s say Poland starts getting antsy (well, antsyer) about Russia doing Russia stuff and really wants more people to feed the war machine in case of WWII breaking out, they already have a citizenship by descent option but the proper documentation to qualify can be tricky, but if they decide they really want to increase immigration I don’t think it would be out of the question for them to open up a pathway for someone who can show a DNA test with X% polish ancestry. In that hypothetical it might be kind of an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire situation, but maybe it would still be preferable to the situation in someone’s home country.
It’s just one more tool in the box that can open up new avenues for people to explore. It may not pan out for everyone or even most people who look into it, but in some small handful of cases it may save their lives.
We’re not talking to you in this thread, we’re talking about you. You don’t need to jump in with “but that’s not annoying!” After people answer the question OP posed, that’s not useful.
Oh, pardon me, I forgot you’re allowed to find someone seeking a path forward in life as dreadfully inconvenient, because where you were born grants you superiority, m’lord
There is only one country that gives a flying shit about where your great-grandma allegedly came from, and that’s Israel. For every other country you’re not figuring out any options, you’re cosplaying.
It’s not quite the same, but I know someone who acquired Italian citizenship because their grandparents were Italian/had Italian citizenship. They don’t even speak Italian.
Italy has recently changed their requirements and now language proficiency and residency are required. But yes, up until very recently heritage was mostly enough.
They did not get citizenship because of their grandparents.
They got a foot in the door because they knew someone living in Italy (if that even is the case), and then went through everything a normal migrant needs to go through.
You don’t need to have ancestors there in order to live somewhere.
What are you even talking about? They both acquired it over Jure Sanguinis, both of them barely understand any Italian. They have dual Italian citizenship.
Nobody said anything about needing ancestors to live somewhere else.
This is not true. I personally acquired citizenship of Lithuania for example, solely because my grandmother was born there and left during Soviet occupation (as many did). I speak no Lithuanian, have no other connection to the country, and have never even been there.
their obsession with genome analysis / where one of their great-great-grandfathers came from.
“i am italian, german, polish, chinese and cree!” “no, you are us-citizen and don’t speak any language but english.”
The whole ethnic identity is mostly to identify where in the world you ethnically originated from to other Americans. Because almost every single person in the US is either an immigrant, or a descendent of one. So we identify to each other where we came from as Americans.
Where people go wrong with this is if they happen to be traveling internationally and take this US centric identity with them. If traveling internationally, you could be ethnically from the place you are traveling. But in that context, you’d be American. This is a part of that whole well traveled awareness thing.
The genealogy thing is their curiosity in tracing that ethnic origin with greater detail. I personally don’t find it too interesting myself, but different strokes.
Edit: I’d like to add, this is mostly in case other people reading this thread are wondering why this is even a thing. It’s truly an annoying behavior.
Really, I think a far more charitable (and common) instance of this is an american, say, travelling to Ireland and noting that they actually have Irish heritage. And then some nice local appreciates their interest and they have something to talk about. American tourists these days don’t seem any more annoying or tone deaf than, say German, Israeli, or UK tourists. If you encounter a tourist off the beaten path, then they are almost always polite, curious, and a very nice person. And if you are hanging out where the big bus tourists congregate… well, what did you expect? They are dumbasses fishing for selfies - the lowest common denominator doesnt differentiate based on nationality.
You’re not wrong, this is totally a thing. I’m a euro mutt (I coin for myself) and I can trace some lines.
It’s because were all immigrants in a young country. Even the census we take asks where we hail from. I’ve maked “American” on it the last two times. It is a deal here, and yes it can be annoying especially when you get the tropes going. “Oh my family is Italian we like big families” mean while I’m fourth gen Italian (mixed obvs) and like what, are you inbreeding to stay Italian? Your husbands last name is “smith” like, fuck off. My full first gen Italian great grandmother married a first gen polack and had one kid. One. Fuck off with your stereotypes. This bitch I’m thinking of feed her kids all the american processed foods, give no fucks about the quality of her food ingredients or where they come from, just fuck off “were Italian” bitch shut up.
Yep. And so many white people here claim native ancestry. “I’m 1/16th Cherokee” they’ll say. Usually it is Cherokee because that’s the group their parents or grandparents had heard of and told them. I think it comes from trying to absolve the guilty feelings of what the settlers did to the natives.
The genealogy conversations are just tiring and predictable.
So many! I think it was possibly, a almost pop culture trend in the 70s to claim native history tbh. So many folks I met who do this would have been teens/young adults in that time. But you’re probably right, it’s some warped cope for the atrocities committed against native people. Fucking warped.
Potentially annoying American here with a point of clarification: is it annoying just to be interested in one’s heritage, or is it Americans that make that heritage their entire personality?
the identity thing. as far as i see it’s usually white people who do this. to gain ethnic distinction?
sure its fun to find out more abt what your granparents did (unless you are german).
Also never forget that these gene tests are almost fraudulent. Mostly bull.
I think a lot of it stems from living in a relatively young, immigration heavy, multicultural country and the little conversations that arise from that.
At least in the city I grew up and still live in I have met a lot of people who either immigrated or whose parents immigrated from other countries. In high school human geography I learned it takes a couple generations for an immigrant family to fully assimilate into a new culture, so a lot of these first/second generation immigrants still have connections and traditions from their family’s old country. The history of those countries (or at least the regions modern countries occupy) stretch back hundreds to thousands of years. I think many caucasian Americans, often raised to be competitive, want that sense of history when comparing to their own family but American culture has “only” developed over the past 300-400 years. To get an older/deeper sense of heritage they have to ask where their ancestors that immigrated to the US immigrated from, and because a sense of superiority is at least some part of American culture that older heritage has to be better than the other older heritages and therefore something to be loud and proud about. Even if it isn’t actually a big part of one’s life.
All that to say yes I think you’re right about it being a matter of ethnic distinction, which I think is brought about by the circumstances of US history. I definitely get how it’s annoying.
I’m an immigrant in the U.S. When my accent gives me away, I’m often asked where I’m from, which somehow leads to the discovery that the other person is also Irish. Or Scottish. Usually Irish.
I’m not offended so much as confused. “I am Irish” carries an expectation of shared culture and experience. When that’s clearly not what’s being offered, it lands less as connection and more hollow. Offense arises when clichés or affected accents appear. That’s no longer about identity; it’s just being an eejit.
I’ve always understood it to be a remnant of a culture that de-emphasized genealogy and family pedigree, and had a lot more cultural and ethnic mixing in marriages at an earlier era. In Europe, it seems like there are a lot more family crests and aristocratic titles, from centuries of families maneuvering for political power through strategic marriages and what not, and stronger cultural taboos against marrying and having children outside of one’s ethnic group (and religion), at least up until maybe World War II.
So if there’s just less to learn from DNA testing (a person who happens to already have records of all 16 of their great-great-grandparents, who all lived in the same geographical area), I’d expect there not to be much demand for that kind of analysis.
Or maybe I’m wrong to focus on the gentry and aristocratic families, and have a misplaced view of how long that kind of stuff culturally persisted in Europe.
“germans”, “french”, “danes” weren’t a thing. up until recently. they are genetically diverse groups.
euros aren’t all nobles. i don’t know my grandmas maiden names.
there was a lot of movement (read: fucking around) in europe. what do these tests even mean by “dutch”?
I was under the impression that the DNA kits described actual ethnic groups and showed a map of the distribution of those groups overlaid on modern political borders or region names. Here’s the page on 23 and Me’s reports, which have a lot more granular detail, mapped onto modern political borders for reference, but where any listed nation or territory may have up to dozens of different sub-groups listed.
“English, Scotch, Welch and Irish” always drives me nuts. You can’t even pronounce one of them correctly; how is that honouring your “heritage”?
And I also wonder how the machines that create these results even manage to distinguish between, say, English and Welsh “genes”. I mean sure, there’s some science behind it. 0.1% to be precise.
Jay parlay Francsays trey beein. Jaytude on laycole quart ans.
if i had the power to do so, i’d give you a french passport right away.
maybe clearing this up: germany has a hereditary citizenship. i. e. children of germans can get a german passport.
being “german” means owning german citizenship (or citizenship of the one of the former constructs the federal republic sees as its precursors), not owning a set of genes. you can have no ‘distinct european genes’ (e.g. be ainu?) at all and get citizenship for your kids, as long as you have it. you can be “genetically german” and still don’t have a passport.
jus sanguinis usually isn’t genetically defined
If it means we can get citizenship somewhere else and get out… you’re offended by us figuring out our options? Oh how inconsiderate of us
It typically doesn’t. Most countries don’t care about where your ancestors came from. Being fluent in the local language and culture will generally give you a leg up if you already qualify for immigration so I hope your family kept those alive (and not Americanized versions like Irish-Americans wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day). But your ancestry is usually completely irrelevant.
Those genetic test results absolutely don’t mean anything. If you’re culturally American with an American passport, you’re American and that’s it.
Kind of funny you specifically call out Irish-Americans, because Ireland does actually have some options for citizenship-by-descent. It’s not quite as simple as anyone with Irish ancestry can become a citizen, but it is a thing.
If you have a grandparent who was born in Ireland you’re eligible
Or if your parent was an Irish citizen at the time of your birth
So hypothetically if you have a great grandparent born in Ireland, your parent could apply for Irish citizenship, even though their parents (your grandparents) weren’t citizens and had never set foot in Ireland
And if they did that before you were born you would also be eligible
And so on down the line to your children, and their children, etc. if everyone keeps on top of it.
There’s actually a decent handful of countries with some sort of citizenship-by-descent, not a majority by a longshot, and of course every country that does offer it has different requirements and restrictions, but for some people it can potentially be a viable pathway to another citizenship.
i am not going to verify what you said, but regardless of if it is true, if your grandparents have the citizenship, you probably don’t need dna test to find that out…
It’s absolutely an edge case, but there are still a lot of wonky family situations out there, people who are estranged from their family for any number of reasons, adoption, people raised by their grandparents under the impression that they were their parents to hide the fact that their sister is really their mom and they were hiding a teen pregnancy, your mom cheated and your dad isn’t actually your father, etc.
And sometimes that all stays under wraps until someone in the family takes a DNA test.
I have a friend with a big family who just recently discovered that most of her aunts and uncles aren’t actually her grandfather’s biological children. She and her siblings haven’t done a test themselves and her father’s dead so the jury is still out on whether she’s blood related to him or not.
But if she’s not, and she finds out who her actual biological grandfather is, it’s not impossible that that may open up a new pathway to citizenship through him.
And laws change, as a hypothetical, let’s say Poland starts getting antsy (well, antsyer) about Russia doing Russia stuff and really wants more people to feed the war machine in case of WWII breaking out, they already have a citizenship by descent option but the proper documentation to qualify can be tricky, but if they decide they really want to increase immigration I don’t think it would be out of the question for them to open up a pathway for someone who can show a DNA test with X% polish ancestry. In that hypothetical it might be kind of an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire situation, but maybe it would still be preferable to the situation in someone’s home country.
It’s just one more tool in the box that can open up new avenues for people to explore. It may not pan out for everyone or even most people who look into it, but in some small handful of cases it may save their lives.
Sorry if I’m missing something, but aren’t everyone’s aunts and uncles (other than those by marriage) the biological children of their grandparents?
If your grandmom cheated on your grandad, your aunts and uncles may not be his kids.
in some small number of cases you may get hit by a meteorite during that search, so be careful.
In some small number of cases you may die in a house fire, and I’ll bet you have smoke detectors and fire extinguishers around just in case
“smoke detectors everywhere” is not a norm everywhere in the world in a same way it is in usa.
“americans are not aware there is a world behind their borders” is already on a list in this thread, but thank you for practical presentation 😂
We’re not talking to you in this thread, we’re talking about you. You don’t need to jump in with “but that’s not annoying!” After people answer the question OP posed, that’s not useful.
This is ironically another annoying behaviour.
Unable to resist a challenge. But it’s usually the doubling- and tripling down that makes it really funny.
Oh, pardon me, I forgot you’re allowed to find someone seeking a path forward in life as dreadfully inconvenient, because where you were born grants you superiority, m’lord
Yes, we see it, you can stop demonstrating the annoying behaviour now.
by all means do. but don’t put that on facebook?
Why wouldn’t we give our family members a tip on how they can also get out, on a platform where they would see it?
did anyone ever get a passport because some lab result said they were 10% “genetically slovakian”?
I don’t know about Slovakian, but such places exist, yes.
great, another american immigrant. we need to build a wall and make america pay for it.
Great attitude you got there
Aww Cheesus that’s funny. I hope you weren’t serious. As if “having Italian genes” makes you eligible for a residence permit.
Italian ancestry can qualify you for citizenship, that’s not the best example.
Source: me, American of Italian ancestry working to get dual citizenship
Not Italy perhaps, but there are such places.
You don’t get citizenship just because you had ancestors there once.
Otherwise everyone is an African citizen.
Germany will give you citizenship for having had a single Great Great Grandfather from Bavaria. Ask me how I know…
There are such places.
There is only one country that gives a flying shit about where your great-grandma allegedly came from, and that’s Israel. For every other country you’re not figuring out any options, you’re cosplaying.
It’s not quite the same, but I know someone who acquired Italian citizenship because their grandparents were Italian/had Italian citizenship. They don’t even speak Italian.
Italy has recently changed their requirements and now language proficiency and residency are required. But yes, up until very recently heritage was mostly enough.
They did not get citizenship because of their grandparents.
They got a foot in the door because they knew someone living in Italy (if that even is the case), and then went through everything a normal migrant needs to go through.
You don’t need to have ancestors there in order to live somewhere.
What are you even talking about? They both acquired it over Jure Sanguinis, both of them barely understand any Italian. They have dual Italian citizenship.
Nobody said anything about needing ancestors to live somewhere else.
This is not true. I personally acquired citizenship of Lithuania for example, solely because my grandmother was born there and left during Soviet occupation (as many did). I speak no Lithuanian, have no other connection to the country, and have never even been there.
ITT: confidently incorrect people who can’t take 5 seconds to do an internet search, lol.