re: #177 freetoken

Yup, that is something that I’ve noticed too.

Here are the biological facts (assuming no in-breeding):

You have 2 parents
4 grandparents
8 great grandparents
16 great great grandparents
32 great great great grandparents

That takes us back just to the early 19th century. Go back 10 generations and you are at 1024 ancestors, and so on.

Yet people will pick one particular belief (and it usually is just that - a belief - with little evidence) about where they “come from” and emphasize that.

It’s sort of like picking pizza toppings - has little to do with the essence of “pizza” and a whole lot to do with the person doing the ordering.

Mine I thought was fairly straight forward. 25% Irish, 25% German on Dad’s side and 25% Slovene, 25% Slovak on Mom’s. Then I did some research. Found a census that said my maternal grandmother’s maternal grandparents were actually born in Scotland not Ireland like we had always thought. And I suspect some stuff about my Slovak ancestors as well since my grandmother’s folks were Greek Catholics rather than Roman Catholics like what most of Slovakia is. And then there are family lore about the German side being so called Swiss-German. And there’s of course migration. I like your pizza analogy. I’m less Irish than my Dad and yet I emphasize it much more than he does.