My European Origins

It is not realistic to make statements about your "origin" by saying something like "I’m Scots-Irish" or "I’m Native American", or "African-American", because truth be told, no American is pure anything, other than purely human.

I can say I’m 100% American, and 99% North Carolinian (I was born in South Carolina). As far as ethnicity or "race", I’m "white" or "Anglo-Saxon" or "Caucasian", whichever you prefer. As far as my ancestral origins are concerned, I haven’t proven all my lines back to the immigrants, but all of my known ancestors were in America by the 1600's and the 1700's, mostly from Western Europe.

I can certainly claim the following ancestry:

Scottish (Scotland)

Scots-Irish (Ulster Scots from Northern Ireland)

English (England)

Welch (Wales)

German (from the various Germanic states)

Melungeon (probably from Portugal, though that is uncertain)

African American (Africans brought to America in slavery, later freed)

I may also be able to claim these as ancestors:

Native American (Cherokee)

French (Frances)

"Dutch" (Holland a. k. a. Netherlands)

Spanish (Spain)

These last few are not yet proven, but certainly possible.

Truthfully, I am only interested in my ancestry back to about 1500 A.D. I believe that anything before that is just too far back to be of personal interest to me. However, once you get back that far, and into the remote mists of time, I could probably claim all kinds of ancestry, heretofore unknown to me, such as Roman, Jewish, Russian, and who knows what else. But like I said, it is too far back to be of much interest, except in a general sense.

I have not done any European genealogical research, nor do I plan to do any, at least until I’ve fully documented my own American ancestry, and since I’m a 10^th (or more) generation American, it could take all my life to find out all about my American roots. However, it is a journey that I'm willing to take (metaphorically), given proper access to European records via the Internet.