Some random stuff that’s been happening lately. The title was just an attempt to pull together in a single sentence the three themes below. * * * Last week, I was out and about and quite hungry, so I went to wonderful Asian Buffet place in Lynnwood for lunch. This place is AWESOME and not […]
Given the tremendous influx of European immigration to the United States in the latter decades of the 19th Century and early decades of the 20th, like many Americans, I can trace my ancestry back 5 or 6 generations, but there it pretty much stops. From there back, my heritage essentially becomes countries of origin; names of people replaced by nations. I know my ancestors came from Germany, Poland and Ireland and a small handful of other nations, but when I try to use genealogy to answer Stuart’s question of “Who Am I?”, what insight could examining this diffusion of nationalities, each somewhat different from one another, possibly offer me? If I want to understand my own personal culture, my heritage shaped by the cultures and circumstances of my ancestors, if I am 9/16th’s German, 5/16th’s Polish and 1/16th Irish, does that mean my individual heritage is influenced along those same proportions? Am I going to need a calculator to figure out who I am and where I come from? Such is the challenge facing a Diffused American.
