its 100% a discomfort with being generically american. because theyre products of displacement caused by capital and state coercion. but the old world’s more colorful, more primordially ‘cultural’. they can splash some determinacy onto themselves by showing which lego blocks theyre made out of.
I always enjoy these conversations with people really into it because they want to know about mine and we were literally just European mutts at the point before we became American. The strongest of a single group is Swedish because the great-grandparents of my mother came directly from Sweden. (Which makes me like what you know.) Everyone else had been in America for some generations and half of them had morphed into Elevated Americans by that point.
Someone in the family got obsessed at one point and gave us all the stuff and we trace back to like England, a bunch of German states, more Scandinavian states, etc. but literally the lines of half the family or more were already here by the Civil War. And they were combined families when they came over which is why some of them came over. And gobs of them had been displaced by wars so where they came from may not even mean anything.
Speaking of libraries, the State of Michigan revitalized its library by adding a huge geneology section by combining historical records from across the state, every time I've gone there (it's a repository library), it's been relatively packed (for a state library where you can't check out half or more of the materials) with tons of generally older women, but sometimes younger women, there trying to trace this all out.
