Welcome to the Ethnic American

In this blog I am going to explore American history and other related issues, not through the lens of the state and/or one of its accompanying political activist groups or another, but through the lens of my ancestors, their neighbours, and relations.

By “American” I by no means refer to either the indigenous peoples of the Americas — whose own peoples never referred to themselves or these continents, in whole or in part, as “America” or “American” — or the citizens of the United States.

By “American” I refer to the English (and related) peoples that established themselves here in the New World with Jamestown (1607) and Plymouth (1620), and grew to subsume such other northwestern European colonial rivals as New Netherlands (1664) and ultimately even new New France (1763), and established a unique ethnic (ie. ethno-cultural) identity of its own, as a thing distinct from its English father (and other colonial brethren) no later than the opening of the American Revolution (1775).

In the process and over time various outliers would come to be assimilated into the American identity, carrying in various influences of their own, but always as contributors to that fundamental identity. Likewise, while elements of the American tribe would fracture over time, the peoples, their inter-relations, and their culture continued to span the political border.

My own relations here extended all the way back to early Jamestown, and later to the Mayflower and Plymouth, via my great(x10) grandfather, Stephen Hopkins.

We all have 2,048 great(x10) grandfathers incidentally.

Stephan is one of mine.

As is his daughter Constance, who helped cook that first, archetypal, American Thanksgiving dinner.

Of course, as the numbers indicate, they are in the ancestry of a lot of Americans, which is one of the things that make us Americans, ie. shared ancestry.

While I haven’t researched many of my American lines beyond the beginning of the American Revolutionary War — when my own ancestors came up to settle the western hinterlands of the British “Province of Quebec” (not the modern Canadian province) and soon after found the American colony of “Upper Canada” in that region — another of older lines extends back to Edward “the Wizard” Diamond of Marblehead, who in 1684 adopted two Naumkeag Indian lads into his family and gave one of them his name. Edward Diamond Jr. of Marblehead is my genetic ancestor and his offspring were among the American Loyalists who went into exile in the wake of the American Revolution, and went on to pioneer Upper Canada.

As for my own direct, paternal Martin line, I’m obviously not a descendant of those Mayflower Martins.

No one is.

They all died that first winter.

However, while I was long stuck and unable to bridge the gap left by the Revolution in my Martin line, recent breakthroughs (records + DNA comparison), in the wake of Hallowe’en as these things go it seems, have at last bridged that gap. My direct paternal Martin ancestry runs back to Solomon Martin who came over from England aboard the James in 1635. He settled for a time in Gloucester, Massachusetts before heading inland to Andover and the frontier; a drive that shows itself time and again among the Martins since their first appearance in the great frontier that was the New World.

I do have other strands of ancestry. My father’s maternal line is all French, extending back to among the earliest Canadiens and Acadians of New France, while my own maternal ancestry is all eastern European and among the first arrivals on the Canadian prairies. They also turned out to be far more Germanic (East Germanic to be specific) than I would have suspected, and even had one or two of the “Those Who Cannot Be Named” in the mix from sometime back.

And so there you have it.

So fix yourself a drink, pull up a chair, and join me in, well, I guess you could say it’s “my exploration of American identity”.