Who is 100% English?

My Dads paternal grandparents were Welsh (hence my surname) and my mothers grandparents (both maternal and paternal) were Irish, so probably not me.
 
One one side my relatives were Hugueneots from France - they even anglised their surname (like the Royal Family did) Hugueneots fled France in main, They were protestants and it was not safe to live in France as when people got angry they blamed protestants and would have a pogrom. Eventually the Sun King made it illegal, so they had to run for their lives or convert. They were expert metal workers and 250 years on they moved from Birmingham to Middlesbrough to develop the Thomas Hills wire works near Metz Bridge in the 1870s.
 
I did mine as my Dad was adopted and never knew his Birth parents, turns out he is Welsh but born in Guisborough
His Birth family lived predominantly in South Bank and came to the area after WW1 to work in the steel works.
We found his Birth Mother but not his birth farther, yet.

Mrs Redpete did hers and found out her dad is not her Birth dad which as you can imagine was quite a shock.
 
Places like South Bank and Grangetown were over 50% Irish of second generation Irish around 1900 - The Irish immigrants came over to work in the Iron and Steel works, many early jobs were unskilled and semi skilled, so the Irish immigrants didn't have special metal working skills except their health and hard work. Ireland was part of the UK up to 1922 and Ireland had too many people for the work available. People were also frightened the Famine would return.

Many of the mining job were unskilled too and a lot of farming labourers moved to the new Ironstone mines from places like Lincolnshire and Norfolk where thousands of labourers were unemployed, as farms needed less workers, say as they switched from sheep/cattle to arable. Some skilled miners came from declining mining areas like Cornwall, but the type of mining was quite different in Cleveland.
 
Interesting, and kind of illustrating why the original question is a bit nonsense, neither the OP nor anyone else has attempted to define its terms of reference.

What is ancestrally English? Is it “from England”? In which case do you mean the England of the 15th century that included Calais and Monmouthshire, the England of the 16th century that included Wales (or if you prefer, the rest of Wales), but not Calais, or the England we now use for sporting purposes that includes none of the above? If you mean of exclusively Anglo-Saxon ancestry then there probably weren’t any of them even in the 10th century. Certainly not in the north what with all the Danes being about and their men being rather horny.

The question is a nonsense. The DNA tests that inspired it can be a bit of fun but are scientific gibberish. And in the end, we are all African apes anyway.
 
I used ancestry too, helps that it’s probably the most used in England and us, so you’ll get lots of dna matches probably more than other platforms. You can also export your dna data and load it into MyHeritage for more hits
 
FishofContemplation said:
Interesting, and kind of illustrating why the original question is a bit nonsense, neither the OP nor anyone else has attempted to define its terms of reference.

What is ancestrally English? Is it “from England”? In which case do you mean the England of the 15th century that included Calais and Monmouthshire, the England of the 16th century that included Wales (or if you prefer, the rest of Wales), but not Calais, or the England we now use for sporting purposes that includes none of the above? If you mean of exclusively Anglo-Saxon ancestry then there probably weren’t any of them even in the 10th century. Certainly not in the north what with all the Danes being about and their men being rather horny.

The question is a nonsense. The DNA tests that inspired it can be a bit of fun but are scientific gibberish. And in the end, we are all African apes anyway.
Click to expand...
I'm no primate. I'm descended from bats on account of my Transylvanian DNA 🤣

cx5rt22t0il81.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top