Aren't we all immigrants, one way or another? What is your story.

Why should anyone get offended? We all learnt that in junior school history lessons surely.

Now please I hope nobody gets offended. But I've had conversations with British people who said 'we are pure English Anglo-Saxons' to which I replied 'ah Germans then' - and they did take offense. The Angles, the Saxons were Germanic tribes that came to settle in the East of England. And the Picts in Scotland. The Viking were Danes and Norwegian who settled in the middle to North East (the Danelaw). So even if we go back a very long way...

How true, FlicketyB!

My Dad was fron a very small Island in the Mediterranean called Malta

Isnt it strange how our attitudes to our ancestors has changed, Twenty or thirty years ago most people wanted to find they were descended from the aristocracy. Now it is our working class roots we are so proud of.

Father's side all seem to have been Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire, and mother's Ayrshire, though her surname had Scandinavian sound - as does DH's middle name, so perhaps my descendants can claim a Viking bloodline!

Thanks for the warning, johanna. I will look out for this condition, if we ever get round to looking for our ancestral DNA.

Well I've traced my family back as far as I can with censuses (if that the right word?) and not found anyone who wasn't born in the english east midlands. Leicestershire mainly and all poor farm labourers and factory workers. Very boring!

Great thread granjura. my ancestral family left Saxony (Germany), also after the religious wars for America. There my maternal great great grandfather's parents perished and at the age of about 8 he was put (to work?) on a ship with a distant relative who was a merchant seaman. Everyone on the ship contracted smallpox when they were in the vicinity of the Cape of Good Hope, but the boy was not ill, therefore he was put off the ship at Saldanha Bay, all by himself. At that stage there were no orphanages in South Africa, and often children were taken in by farmers and put to work. So my great great grandfather worked as a herd boy in the Cape around 1836 or so. He left the first family he was placed with (oral family history records that he was badly treated by them) having made a name for himself as a young man as a blacksmith. This attracted the attention of the farmer's daughter at his next job, and was given a part of the farm when he married my great, great, grandmother. I don't know anything about my father's family and I don't want to either because the bit I do remember about them I didn't like (my parents split when I was very young). So my ancestry I guess is German-South African. My husband proudly! claimed pure Scottish ancestry until quite recently when he discovered that his father's people came from Ireland! We have all the information about my ancestors written up by my aunt who traced most it via church records in Utah where a lot of the people who left Saxony settled. My ancestor had an unusual surname, which resulted in us finding a whole load of hitherto unknown relatives in the US, and the interesting thing was to discover the two 'talents' that run thick and fast through the family - musicality and a love of writing.

anno I bought one of those DNA tests online as a Christmas present.
This one was from a company in Cambridge.

When the kit and bumf arrived it stated in the small print that the DNA is kept!
Not destroyed. That put me off and I wasted £500.--

I have enough Irish to be eligible for an Irish passport - two grandparents born there. Only thing is my grandfather's parents were both Scottish!

The tree has Irish (more), Scottish, Welsh and English. All come from the NorthWest area - Glasgow, N.Wales, Shropshire...and Dublin, which isn't that far away. That's in the 1800s.

About 1900, a lot of the family emigrated, and ended up in Canada, Vermont, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia - and France.

But my youngest grandson has Norman French (from the invasion), Jamaican and Hungarian in the mix. Seems like a good one!

When I did the family tree, I was surprised at how relentlessly English we were. One Scot on my side and OH was a bit upset that my great-grandfather was from Lancashire (wrong side of Pennines for someone who grew up in Yorkshire), but my family were pretty much all agricultural workers who moved to London and became clerks etc.
OH pretty much the same apart from North Wales on his father's side.
Our grandchildren are more interesting as our DiL is a blonde, blue-eyed Spaniard whose family were probably resettled from Galicia to Andalucia in the middle ages. Our SiL plans to get a DNA test as he has very dark hair, skin and eyes and is from a family from the East End of London.

My maternal grandmother was 100% Irish, her mother's family emigrated from Cork during The Famine when her mother was a baby. Her father's family, also Irish came over a bit earlier than that but I do not know when. My grandmother married an English man, to the disgust of his mother who thought Irish catholics the lowest of the low.

My paternal grandfather was also Irish and also catholic, born illegitimate to a woman working as a domestic servant. However he had a Scottish surname, which caused consternation to a Northern Irish colleague in my unmarried days. He couldnt work out someone from Northern Ireland with a Scottish name could be catholic. This was because the origins of protestanism in Ireland lies in the Plantation of Ulster after the Flight of the Earls in 1607. Most of the Protestant immigrants came from Scotland. He came to England when he joined the army during the Boer War. He too mad an English spouse, again to the doubts of her parents, not only was Irish and a catholic he was a soldier.

So I am of mixed ethnicity, if not strictly mixed race and qualify for an Irish passport as my grandfather was born in Ireland. When faced with those ethnicity/race questionnaires, if they are suitably drawn up I variously describe myself as 'white, other' if the choice is English, Irish etc and mixed race if the listing enables me to justify it. Mostly I will just tick British.

All research into DH's family shows him to be English as far as we can trace it back and his mother's family have lived in the same small town in north Bucks since the 16th century.

Oh, no, not again!

I think there is a DNA test that will tell you the ethnic mix of your ancestry. I looked it up once and it's quite expensive, but my sisters and I are thinking of paying for it together. There was a TV series called 'Blood of the Vikings' which measured the proportion of Viking blood around the British Isles - not surprisingly the Northern Isles had by far the most.

I think there is a DNA test that will tell you the ethnic mix of your ancestry. I looked it up once and it's quite expensive, but my sisters and I are thinking of paying for it together. There was a TV series called 'Blood of the Vikings' which measured the proportion of Viking blood around the British Isles - not surprisingly the Northern Isles had by far the most.

My mums side is Leicestershire agricultural labouring back to the 1500s with input from the neighbouring counties of Northants, Cambridge and Lincolnshire.
My Dads side is a bit more of a mystery, several generations go back to Cheshire. They settled around Chester from the mid 1700s and migrated to Liverpool with the Railways. However my paternal grandfather was unknown and possibly died on the battlefields of Flanders. My dad's maternal grandparents came from Belfast and Scotland with a few Lancashire canal folk thrown into the gene pool for good measure.

I would love to know if there is A reliable DNA measure that could tell me more about this.

English ancestors were most likely of mixed Norman/Saxon stock - including 7 generations of rectors of the same parish in Leicestershire. Some of the Scottish ones are thought to have come from the islands, and maybe, far back in the mists of time, migrated from Ireland, in which case they are likely to have been of mixed Celtic and Viking blood. My mum's father's family were from Ayrshire as far back as we can trace and my paternal granny came from Dundee. Two of my GC, if they were sporting types, would be able to compete for England, Scotland or Wales; the other two for England, Scotland or Northern Ireland. Senior GD has African/Caribbean and Irish ancestry as well as ours. Migrants in my ancestry? More likely invaders - Normans, Saxons and Vikings.

What wonderful mixes we have, mines very boringly British as far back as we can trace mostly London or the Midlands ,with some Welsh mixed in there but that's about it..

One set of my grandchildren are one quarter German and the other set are half Irish.

Forgot to say our grand-children look 'typically' Irish despite the 3 races and 9 nationalities involved in the making of them. Nobody would ever look at them and say they are 'mixed race'.

Father's side from Cheshire with a surname from the Scottish lowlands, mother's side Lancashire and mentioned in Doomsday Book. She used to swear that her ancestors were Vikings! Who knows! Therefore very English from a long way back.