I'd love to see the same
analysis done in the U.S., to see whether it would corroborate the findings in David Fischer's excellent book, "
Albion's Seed." With so much frontier to settle, the
U.S. findings presumably would be more smeared out towards the west.
You wouldn't recognize too much of that in America--it is too mixed already. A clue to what people self identify as can be gleaned from census data, which can be drilled down to here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States
ReplyDeleteAnd it will only mix more over the coming years.
I agree that it is very mixed. I went home to a wedding being thrown by the set of cousins who stayed in the area.
ReplyDeleteI glanced over the program, and was struck by the endless diversity of last names. As the church filled up, it looked like the little UN, with every gradation of skin color, including Japanese, and a Scott in a kilt. It amused me to see all this diversity, from the part of the family that stayed at home.
Valerie
I suspect you'd see trails of specific European genes along old rail road lines. I base this on the (possibly false) notion that railroad agents would head for a European sales territory marketing cheap land along the rail right of way. So as the rail agent went up the coast of Norway, say, the Norse genes would spread west along the Burlington Northern Railway... or whatever.
ReplyDeleteExcellent post, Tex.
ReplyDeleteI think the DHF trends would still be discernible, but less dramatic. Even at the beginning, they were only trends, not hard-and-fast. Some Massachusetts Puritans had come from Yorkshire or Bristol - just not as many.
ReplyDeleteIn GB, dialects were sometimes unintelligible to each other as recently as a century ago, but that was less true in North America right from the start. We had a comparatively high rate of internal migration right from the start. One thing that would help, however, is that we know what other groups were added in and when. Scots Irish moved into the Merrimack Valley before they went to Appalachia, and French Canadians came to New England after that. Germans came to Pennsylvania.
In the linked article, there is information about how subtle these patterns were. There's no claim of purity in these genetic pool areas, only a faintly discernable "flavor" that may be a minor part of the whole, and that has a marked geographical pattern to it.
ReplyDelete