re: #261 Edge of a dream AKA Cankles Mccellulite

Yup. “Spelling” was very arbitrary. My Jamestown ancestors (who were there at the massacre) had one of the easier and most common surnames, so it was usually spelled the same.

Many Americans, so it has been reported, claim “German” as the most common ancestral region. You can find news stories about that.

But I doubt it. Most people can’t build their family trees back but a few generations. Yet if one’s ancestors were here by the time of the Civil War, then you probably also have ancestors here back to the beginning of the colonies. Which means you likely have many ancestors from England and Ireland.

There were immigrants from Germanic states in the early colonies, most in PA. So in that regards, yes, many Americans are descended from them too (including me.) Yet those immigrants may not have come from places which today are technically inside the borders of modern Germany. Some came from Prussia, some from in the region bordering France that got switched between powers, and some came from what today is Switzerland.