In 2000 the U.S. Census Bureau published a popular map showing the distribution of the most common ancestry broken down by county (and in Virginia, by independent city). Hamilton Lombard over at the Weldon Cooper Center’s Stat Chat blog has updated the map using 2010 Census data with a new ancestry classification. The Census combined closely related ethnicities such as Swedish, Danish and Finnish into Scandinavian, and those of the British Isles into British. The result is the map above.
No surprises here for Virginia. The state is still dominated by people descended from Africa and the British Isles, with German ancestry common in the Shenandoah Valley. But what’s that yellow category, “American”? There are large segments of Virginia’s population, especially in the western part of the state, who don’t identify themselves as having a pre-American ancestry at all. Lombard suggests that those areas coincide with Scotch-Irish settlement.
My ancestry is predominantly British with a little Dutch and French Huguenot thrown in but the first Bacon in my family set foot in Sussex County, Delaware, in the late 1600s, so I have to say, if the Census Bureau ever comes calling me, I’ll be inclined to identify my ancestry as “American” as well.
— JAB