Let me define two situations. In the first, let us imagine a barrier around what is now the United States. Let us note the nationality of everyone who came to live inside this barrier. These are the immigrants. As each immigrant came in, we ask them where they were born by their country of origin. Of course, it now after the fact and a little late for actual counting but it is possible to make some intelligent guesses about the numbers and the nationalities. If I divide the total number of immigrants by the number who came from England, the answer is something like A% English. In a like manner, perhaps B% came from Ireland, C% came from France, and D% came from Germany.
Here is the second situation. I visit everybody and ask them what percentage of their genes came from the different nations. From this, I can form an average so that the "typical" individual in the US is W% English, X% Irish, Y% French, Z% German, and so on.
The two situations that I have described can and do yield radically different answers. That is, the A, B, C, and D numbers do not look like the W, X, Y, and Z numbers. The reason is that the arrivals of the different nationalities occurred at much different times. It could be the case that the average individual in the US owes 50% of his genes to English origins, yet the English numbered only 10% of the immigrants. In the same way, the typical American may be only 10% German, but the Germans sent more immigrants than any other nationality.
In quoting some statistics in the last note, I wanted only to emphasize the importance of the German immigrants to America. In the Germanna colonies, the numbers were quite small and I wished to note that over the course of time, many Germans came to America. I even used a personal example to suggest that some people may have forgotten their origins. Some forgot deliberately, others lost track in the passage of time.
The numbers yesterday came from Shirley Riemer who was quoting Dr. Don Heinrich Tolzmann, the president of the Society for German-American Studies. His work seems to have appeared in the UGAC-USA Newsletter for 3 September 1992. (I cannot find the full title to this newsletter in her sixteen pages of reference titles.)
The twenty-sixth through the thirtieth chapters of Riemer's "The German Research Companion" are:
26) Business and trade,
27) Keeping track of time,
28) This and that,
29) Cultural institutions, and
30) Libraries, museums, publishers.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.