How much do you care about keeping a connection to your ancestral homeland?

Eric Ringham October 11, 2011, 5:00 AM Oct 11, 2011

More than 16 percent of the Minnesota population claims Norwegian ancestry, which may help explain interest in the current visit by the king and queen of Norway. Today’s Question: How much do you care about keeping a connection to your ancestral homeland?

About the blogger

Eric Ringham

eringham@mpr.org

Ron

About 15 percent, maybe 20

GaryF

Being part German Luxembourger and part Irish sure I have followed my family tree back to the old country and follow their traditions.

I love the American experience where people have come from across the globe for a chance at a better life.

What I don’t get is the whole royalty thing. Someone being more important than you or having more rights because they just happened to be born as “royalty” is so out dated.

Whether it’s Prince Harry or King Harry, I don’t care.

Hiram

I couldn’t care less about maintaining ties with the ancestral homelands, such as they are.

Jon Bohlinger

I still have family in Wisconsin, otherwise, I would only go there for Sunday beer runs.

Emery

Slow news day? Please tell me the new intern formed this particular ‘question of the day ‘. ;^)

Lorentza Ruud

My Norwegian heritage is very important to me. It helps me explain why I eat lutefisk for Christmas every year. Also, I love my family traditions even though they are descended from the peasant Norwegians of 150 years ago. (i.e. No one in Norway eats lutefisk anymore)

As for the King and Queen, I wish I could go and see them. I am happy that there is a Crown Princess for the first time in Norway right now!

Also, the Norwegian royal family gave some of the first money to build the Concordia Language Villages, so we can thank them for that!

Brent J

Keeping the connection to my norwegian ancestral homeland has been very important to me and my family. We love to continue the norwegian traditional foods especially during the holidays. We have gone so far as to visit/vacation in Norway with our family (which was absolutely beautiful!).

Steve the Cynic

My ancestral homeland is Earth, and my connection to my Earthling heritage is very important to me.

Steve the Cynic

“It helps me explain why I eat lutefisk for Christmas every year.”

Yup. That’s something that needs explaining. 😉

(And I like lutefisk.)

GregX

I am 5th generation American. the strength of my connection is that I know my family and genetics have a historical tie there ( Ireland, South Germany, Czech Republic) , but I make my life and my history here. Hopefully for the better.

Sue de Nim

I eat lutefisk. It’s the piece of cod that passes all understanding.

Jim G

When my Norwegian bachelor farmer great-uncle passed away years ago, six cousins formed a LLC to keep the homestead farm in the family. Without this shared home farm I’m sure we would have lost contact with our extended Norwegian family members. We tend to be a stubborn lot, each of us is always right, you know, but we make it work. I’m proud of my Norwegian heritage.

Philip

A LOT! In the past five years I’ve become a near fanatic on genealogy, particularly the Norwegian side. I’ve gotten into a serious study of the Vikings and have attended more Nordic festivals than I can count.

I’ve also turned my wood carving toward traditional Norwegian and Swedish style, using only traditional, period authentic (Viking) tools. The great thing about this is it has helped me to understand what working in this trade may have been like, which is a cool adventure in of itself.

Bill

When the US starts collapsing people will want to go back to their homeland if possible. I personally wish I had a stronger tie to my homeland, Norway. I wish I owned Kroner’s at least then I could afford to go home.

I keep as little connection to my homeland, Wisconsin, as I can get away with and deny my origin whenever possible.

Mark H.

I grew up in Scotland, and moved here 17 years ago in my early 20s. Because I still have family there, and I actually grew up there, I will always have a tie to my homeland. I understand this is a little different than an ancestral homeland, but I am sure there are many people who moved here from other countries many years ago and still have a close connection to their home country.

Jennifer Gumbel

My German-American heritage is important to me. I have the luxury of learning and speaking my ancestor’s mother tongue without fear of reprisal, something my great grandparents and grandparents didn’t have during the interwar years.

Lisa

I don’t know where my ancestors came from, three out of four of my grandparents were born in the US, and the fourth is untraceable. I’m American and that’s the heritage I celebrate.

John P.w

Which one? Germany, Ireland, France, Italy, Mexico, Belgium, Canada, or the one we’re not sure about? That’s my conundrum.

Kirk

As I get older I find myself wanting more and more to connect with our relatives in the Old Country. Our son went to Sweden this summer to visit the relatives my grandfather left when he emmigrated to the US.

Connections between cultures are important to maintain.

suzie

I honor my ancesters and their incredible courage it took to leave their homes in Europe to get to where they hoped would be a better life for them and their children here in Minnesota. The courage it most of taken to get on a ship at that time and cross the Atlantic. Some of them came before the Civil War and their sons fought in this war. One of my great grandmothers as a teenager, was sent here by her parents to work and send money back so the rest of the family could come here. I celebrate their courage, struggles and work ethic to give themselves, their children and all their future generations a better life.

We still hold to some of their customs and the great food, but we have no “connection” to the homelands – those countries are now no longer the countries my ancesters left.

Steve the Cynic

Connection with one’s ancestry should be balanced. Pride in what one’s forebears accomplished should be balanced with a clear-eyed assessment of their shortcomings. Yes, the pioneers who broke the prairie sod showed great courage, but they also dispossessed the people who were already living on the land. I love lefse and other Scandinavian delicacies, but the murderous, marauding Viking strand of my nordic ancestry is not something I’m proud of.

E.M.

My cutlural heritage and ties to my homeland still run deep in my family. Both sides of my family are Czech and my ancestors settled in the Lonsdale/Montgomery/New Prague general area. Family members speak the language, make traditional Czech foods, listen to and play Czech music and have all kinds of Czech antiques and beautiful glass. It not only is something we are all proud of, but it provides bonds between family members of all ages. When generations are so far removed and the age gaps are large, this is one the thing we can undoubtedly have in common and share and respect.

Jason

I care only as much as my desire to know of my heritage, not for any implied responsibility to that heritage. I am first and will always be an American.

For me, an ethnic pedigree has always been more of a topic of trivia rather than a critical component of my identity. Everyone is of some ethnic persuasion, and thus by default we all have equal reasons for being proud of where we came from.

James

I am AMERICAN.

∑

DTOM

Jane

It is so important to me to know about my heritage and to help share that knowledge with others through the arts. I have been to Norway twice, and am proud to be of that heritage. Our heritage grounds our identity in values and stories that are deeper than those in the consumer culture that is so much of American identity.
Jillellyn Storlie

Giants of the Earth Heritage Center in Spring Grove embrasses this question? Support of the new nonprofit in SE Iowa’s small community has been amazing and international.

http://www.springgrovemnheritagecenter.org/

I myself go to Norway every summer and volunteer with a coastal culture academy at the mouth of the Sognefjord to connect kids and adults with traditional skills of the Norwegian coastal inhabitants before the engine and modern technology. The original skills of our ancesters in Norway and Minnesota are all but lost today. These were important survival skills as well as enjoying a simple life with many pleasures and successes along with the struggles. Students from Prescott College in Arizona spend a week at Litle Færøy every other year. My friends are very jealous.
Jim Shapiro

James – So you’re AMERICAN. Then AMERICA is your ancestral homeland! You must be very proud. What tribe?

Or perhaps you didn’t understand the question.
David

Not as much as I did as a kid. Until I was 15 I had been lead to believe I was 100% Norwegian raised by two parent with 100% Norwegian ancestry. Finding out half was true, the biological father 100% German, over a few decades I began to include native American, native Minnesotan, Northern European, African and Gaian into my sense of human identity. Not to mention all humans as my kin. All life is interrelated, all life is my kin.

Wiki:

“An ancestor is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth).

Two individuals have a genetic relationship if one is the ancestor of the other, or if they share a common ancestor. In evolutionary theory, species which share an evolutionary ancestor are said to be of common descent. However, this concept of ancestry does not apply to some bacteria and other organisms capable of horizontal gene transfer.

Assuming that all of an individual’s ancestors are otherwise unrelated to each other, that individual has 2n ancestors in the nth generation before him and a total of about 2g+1 ancestors in the g generations before him. In practice, however, it is clear that the vast majority of ancestors of humans (and indeed any other species) are multiply related (see Pedigree collapse). Consider n = 40: the human species is more than 40 generations old, yet the number 240, approximately 1012 or one trillion, dwarfs the number of humans that have ever lived.

Ignoring the possibility of other inter-relationships (even distant ones) among ancestors, an individual has a total of 2046 ancestors up to the 10th generation, 1024 of which are 10th generation ancestors. With the same assumption, any given person has over a billion 30th generation ancestors (who lived roughly 1000 years ago) and this theoretical number increases past the estimated total population of the world in around AD 1000. (All of these ancestors will have contributed to one’s autosomal DNA is concerned: this excludes Y-chromosomal DNA and mitochondrial DNA.)

Some cultures confer reverence to ancestors, both living and dead; in contrast, some more youth-oriented cultural contexts display less veneration of elders. In other cultural contexts, some people seek providence from their deceased ancestors; this practice is sometimes known as ancestor worship or, more accurately, ancestor veneration.”

“All life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Sandra Weston

Which of the four (at least) “ancestral homelands” would you prefer me to feel attached to? My forebears have been Americans for close to a hundred years on my father’s side, longer than that on my mother’s, and my ancestral homeland is the USofA.
Jim Shapiro

David – Nice.

Sandra – You and James should get together and have lots of little jingoistic xenophobes.
Jessica E

After learning of all of the religious war that forced European families to move from one Lutheran or Catholic onclave to another, I wonder if our ancestors felt that “tied” to any place. Do Norwegians or Swedes, who’ve lived in those countries for hundreds of years, tie their identities to some other country the way we do?

I decided about a decade ago, for geographical purposes alone, that I am an American. That was around the time that DNA evidence ended my belief in races. Some of my ancestors owned slaves, two other sides were enslaved and objects of mass extermination. What is there to be tied to??? The women were all chattle with few rights, and little is known of their accomplishments, not that I don’t relate, but is this something I want to emulate?

I think our historical practice of worshipping our ancestors, creating tribes and “lands” and “others,” setting ourselves apart, allowed/s us Europeans and eventually Americans to enslave half the world and extort the other half. A fact often overlooked.

For example, when learning about the rise of the middle class under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (same Western Civ class) , my instructor never mentioned the growth of the slave trade under their reign – no it was investing in infrastructure and providing low interest loans for “merchants” (slave traders), in his eyes, that lead to the first middle class. Good grief! Is there anyone with ancestors from Holland that didn’t in some way benefit from East India Company??? Or were they all just honest farmers scratching a living out of the ground?

I hate to be all “One Love,” “God bless the world” on everyone’s enthusiasm over their recent ancestry. HIstory is great! I just hope we don’t use it to set ourselves apart from one another. We are all the same. We are all connected, and more of us do better when we love one another, which you can do even if you are proud to be Norwegian. But, as a student of history, I don’t think human fascination with one anothers’ backgrounds has always come from a place of noble intent.

How many of us today are really doing something to end the slave labor over in Asia that results in the “rolled back” prices we pay for our goods, today??? I wonder why that is.
kimMN

Perhaps if more people had a solid connection with their ancestors culture of ‘work hard and succeed’, we would not see the Occupy Wall Street protesters marching on the lawns of affluent families.

Those kids ( minus those co-opted by the unions and socialist groups as endorsed today by the Democratic Party) would stop asking for free handouts while they twitter and text away for weeks.

If they had a clue, they would protest in front of the White House because our President took millions of the Wall Street bundled campaign money and he signed the Dem’s Dodd-Frank bill that furthered the benefit to Wall Street after the “no strings attached” bail outs.”
Bevans

My ancestral homeland is Minnesota and parts of Wisconsin.

After a few generations, your “ancestral homeland” shouldn’t matter to you. Why should I care where people who died before I was born used to live, besides historic interest?

If you want to see a bunch of people who take their ancestral homelands seriously, look at the Middle East. Not very appealing to me.
Brandy

My ancestors had humble beginnings as migrant workers in Europe. My extended family grew up on a midwestern farm. And my parents still care for the farm today.

I know where my family’s origins are and I hope to one day visit that tiny town in Luxembourg. Until then I have a unique story to share with friends and loved ones. Where we come from is important.

I spoke of my story to a friend of mine and he was a little sad because he didn’t know his story. Native American children lost their stories when they were placed in public schools. Adopted children lost their story when they were taken in by loving parents. Immigrant children lose their story when they are forced to give up their culture and adopt a more Americanized version. We are not meant to know our past just for the sake of clinging hard to it, but we’re meant to derive strength from knowing our personal history and the journeys of our ancestors which got us all where we are today.
Nestor Joel

First of all I am an American.

As Americans though we have all come from diverse cultures and backgrounds, from Native American tribes, to African slaves, to poor immigrants from a multitude of lands. As someone of Finnish heritage removed only a couple generations from those immigrants, my cultural heritage is important, for it makes up what it means to be American. My ancestors brought the wood-fired sauna and the log cabin to this land and have made it richer because they did so! I am also glad that someone else’s ancestors brought the pizza, and others the tortilla, if not, my taste pallette would be much the poorer for it.

To be American means to live within the rich millieu of many cultures, that bring richness and beauty to our national life.

Yes, we are American, but we come from great roots…all of us!
Ed

My paternal and maternal Grandparents arrived in American from England, Ireland and Chile. Though I don’t think it’s important to stay connected with the past I do think it’s instructive to know my ancestors were the “immigrant problem” of an earlier age.
J.S.

Just like “E.M.” (and others) have said, I also do care about my heritage that is Czech. I grew up with certain music, certain smells and tastes, language, etc. that is all in my long term memory and hard to erase 🙂 How lucky I am to end up in MN with the CSPS/Sokol Hall that is now one of the runners for a Partners in Preservation grant! Our heritage are our roots, and PIP is helping us protect them. Great topic, MPR, thanks!
Jason

JessicaE – good points. We should all take care to question any blind reverence we may have for our ancestors.
Ann

I think it is fun to talk to others with a similar background and also interesting to learn about the background of other people. So it is important to me at times.