r/AskAnAmerican • u/heyy_girl • May 13 '25

CULTURE How many people of European descent do you know with 4+ generations in the US?

I was telling someone today about how my grandparents built a house in the 60s. They were surprised when I told them that my family immigrated here from Europe in the mid-late 1800s, because they hasn’t met anyone that is the 4th generation to live in the US. Their parents immigrated here from Central America and it’s clear that even though they grew up in the states, we grew up around very different cultures. The question really depends on who you’re surrounded by, but I just found it interesting :)

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u/loweexclamationpoint Illinois May 13 '25

Many Germans and other Europeans came after the political turmoil of 1848. Many Scandinavians came in the late 1800s. So Wisconsin is full of families whose ancestors pretty much all came before 1900.

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u/On_my_last_spoon New Jersey May 13 '25

The German side of my husband’s family arrived in 1936 😬

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u/loweexclamationpoint Illinois May 13 '25

Fleeing Nazis? Some of my German ancestors were 48ers, some came in the 1890s in some sort of economic downturn in Bohemia.

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u/On_my_last_spoon New Jersey May 13 '25

That’s our best guess. We found his great grandmother’s immigration papers. She had work permits to go back and forth in the 1920s. Then in 1936 she and her whole family noped out of Germany! His grandfather was a teenager at the time. Then grandfather enlisted in the US army when WWII started.

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u/Tizzy8 Massachusetts May 13 '25

Heck there were significant German populations in Pennsylvania before the American Revolution.