How four British migrations defined America

[elleng]

They came from different places and with different ideas, which still resonate today.

'Early British settlement of the American colonies came in four distinct waves, from different places. Puritans, Cavaliers, Quakers, and Borderers had their own ideas of what America should be. Some of the cultural fault lines in today's America can be traced back to those differences.

How many Americans are of British descent? It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Is that because, in an age of hyphenated identities, the founding one is still the default? Or has that identity become so amalgamated that it is now irrelevant? Perhaps the correct answer is: a bit of both.

In the 1980 Census, 61.3 million Americans (32 percent) self-reported British ancestry; most claimed English descent (26 percent), followed by Scottish (4 percent), and tiny amounts of Welsh (

[wnylib]

1. A lot of Americans have British ancestry that they are not aware of.

I had a vague idea of some English ancestry in my father's family, but knew nothing about it until genealogy research took me back to John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Colony and further. They were mostly English, but there were a couple Scottish and Welsh lines, too.

There are millions of descendants of New England colonists in the US today. Millions more descend from the other English colonies. Intermating with people from other countries in the generations since then means that many people who identify with other European cultures, or as Hispanic, Native American, African American and Asian also have British ancestry. Barack Obama is one example.