How did your waspy old money ancestors show their thriftiness?

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06/20/2024 21:33

Subject: How did your waspy old money ancestors show their thriftiness?

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Anonymous

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Anonymous wrote:Weird of OP to start a thread asking about “your WASP ancestors”. Very few people are from WASP lineage nowadays…

Anyhow, a lot of these things people are talking is just about people dealing with poverty. We are much wealthier than our ancestors. We don’t need to live like England during the air raids

??? Huge swaths of the Southeastern US are nothing but WASPS. Even in the NE/Midwest there are plenty but you mix in more Irish/Italian Catholics.

No. White Southerners don’t count as WASP. They tend to be Southern Baptist Protestants and tend to be of Scots-Irish stock.
The true WASPS are from the Northeast, historically

Plenty of white southerners are Anglo Saxon, with ancestors from England descended from the three Germanic peoples the Anglos, The Saxons, and the Jutes. There are also tons of southerners who are not southern Baptist.

Geez. It sounds like you have never been to "the south" and know nothing about it so you are just promoting stereotypes. My WASPY grandparents would be horrified if you assumed they were Scottish, Irish, or - heaven forbid - BAPTIST.

And not to mention the scotch-Irish are called Ulster Scots in the UK, many of which who came to early colonial southern U.S. were second sons of aristocracy and were the beginning of what is “WASP” now. Ulster Scots were mostly Englishmen/Lowland Scots of Protestant landed gentry origin who participated in the highland clearances and the plantation of Ulster.

You can draw a straight geneological line from many/most “WASPy” families in the north and south to an unbroken chain of transfers of wealth/property that go back to at least then English civil wars, if not William the conqueror. The 3 epicenters of waspy-ness heritage are Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York (with New York developing this later). The Carolinas are on the bubble. Typically these families are of long lines of Episcopalians or Methodists (technically methodist episcopal). But Presbyterians aren’t uncommon, depending on where their ancestors fell on the questions of the English civil war and some may even be Baptist, though Baptists tended to be much more plentiful in lower class early immigrants, but many higher class British intermarried with higher class Baptists of lowland Europe and Rhineland Germany origins.

Oh, blah blah blah. I'm a descendant of president John Adams. He was a Congregationalist turned Unitarian. Both traditions were very common with Massachusetts WASPs at the dawn of our Republic.

I’m the PP… Congregationalists were basically the puritans and pilgrims. They’re also very closely related to Presbyterians. Basically depends on which part of the UK you came from and which of the many different factions in the English civil wars your ancestors were aligned with.

In fact while Virginia was mostly Episcopalian (and later Methodist), Massachusetts Bay Colony had a sizeable congregational population. As I said before, New York and the Carolinas were similar in their concentration of well-to-do European migrants. And later you can add Kentucky because of early westward expansion through the Cumberland Gap of, yet again, second sons of landed Virginia and Carolina gentry, largely of Scot’s Irish origins, but also English and now more German and low country Dutch/flemish starting to be added in.

In general, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, Congregationalists are all Calvinists. Though it’s complicated with the Presbyterians and the evolution of the church in Scotland from Anglicanism, which did sort of evolve a bit differently. Baptists are also Calvinist but have an even bigger asterisk than Presbyterians. There are shared Calvinist roots across all of these denominations but the faith traditions have all diverged quite a bit over centuries.

There were many smaller groups of Protestants who created other communities in the colonies: the Huguenots in Charleston, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Mennonites/Anabaptists, etc etc.

There is a reason there is a P in WASP - instead of an e for Episcopalians. In fact, it could be shortened to WP as the AS is redundant - pretty much all of the white Protestants had Anglo Saxon heritage by default and Protestantism basically only existed in the Anglo-Saxon countries of Northern Europe.

By pretty much any metric, Protestantism, across the denominations, had a strangle hold on political and economic power in the US/British colonies from the Pilgrims until it began to fade in the post-Vietnam era and today.

No matter the wealth, white Anglo Saxon Protestants aligned to support their kind and maintain dominance in American society.

For some, the term WASP has evolved in many circles to mean descendants of the gilded age industrialists of New York and Pennsylvania, or the descendants of the Boston Brahmins, or the Virginia gentlemen farmers, but its origins (which are relatively recent - like post WWII) it meant the entire category of people, who were White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant and thus likely had many generations in the U.S., which meant they were likely to be upper middle class or higher for several generations, with some level of accumulated wealth, etc. Laborers during this time tended to be Catholics from Ireland and other parts of Europe.

The Scots-Irish you think of now, of under developed Appalachia and Hillbilly elegy fame really developed as a uniquely poverty stricken segment during the depression and after WWII as the rest of the world began to modernize and they were left behind. Largely agrarian and few options to diversify and agriculture became less profitable. But many of these Scots Irish also “got out” by selling off or developing their land, starting businesses, sending their kids to colleges, etc. Though the Hillbilly Elegy Appalachians also had additional wrinkles related to the rise and fall of
Industry in the Ohio river valley…

The people who are still in this cycle of poverty could have very well descended from British nobility and the elite of early America but the choices of their ancestors in the last 100 years meant that they are still in the Hollow but other branches of their family trees could seem more like the DCUM ideal of WASP.