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Art, Music, History, and Linguistics
Question: What % of white Americans have colonial roots?
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[QUOTE="russ_watters, post: 6002032, member: 142"] But this is just an example of the problem pointed out by @phyzuy in post #2. Saying "my mom's side" really just means one of a possible 128 branches on that half of your tree. So you've only covered 2 of the 256 ancestors you have at that time. I've done some genealogy, and got my mother hooked on it. The way it generally works is that you take your family name (your fathers' last name) and your mother's maiden name (your grandfather's last name) and trace just those names back as far as you can take them. The rest of the people in the tree don't have a name you recognize, so you tend to ignore them. This makes for a very incomplete/biased view of your lineage. Given the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, it is very likely that essentially everyone who isn't a member of a just-off-the-boat and very isolated community has ancestors at 8 or 10 generations back, from everywhere that is realistic to have relatives from. My mother's side is pretty isolated Pennsylvania German, and though we can only trace her mom's last name back to the 1880 in Germany, they settled in an area populated by Pennsylvania Germans since about 1700. It would be highly unlikely that one of my thousand ancestors wasn't in Pennsylvania at that time. But the fact that it would take me an enormous amount of work to trace back all thousand to verify it tells me it really isn't all that relevant. [/QUOTE]
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Question: What % of white Americans have colonial roots?
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