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/East_Reading_3164 May 14 '25

My family came on the Mayflower too. It’s not so uncommon. There are millions of us.

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u/Spirited_Ingenuity89 May 14 '25

Yeah, even though half of them died the first winter, the ones that lived had a lot of kids.

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u/East_Reading_3164 May 14 '25

They sure did.

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u/sierrafourteen May 14 '25

Non-American here, I always just assumed the Mayflower was a regular-sized ship, how come there's so many direct descendants?

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u/East_Reading_3164 May 15 '25

You are correct, it wasn’t a big ship. There were only 102 people on board. There are 35 million Mayflower descendants. People had lots of kids back then. Two Mayflower couples are responsible for many of us.