Reply to If you're of Irish Protestant ancestry, do you consider yourself Irish American?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What’s problematic is that — still — part of the Irish (Catholic) identity is the experience of oppression by the British.  It may be stronger for Irish-Americans than Irish because so many of our ancestors were driven out by the British. And Scots-Irish are seen as on the other side of that.

My great grandfather was burned in Ireland — his wife was born here but her parents were Irish.  When my grandmother married, it was sort of a big deal that she married a man of Scottish extraction (only after he converted).  Interestingly he always told everyone his family was Scottish.  When I researched, they were actually Scots-Irish … but I think that would have been viewed poorly in their Irish community so they identified as Scottish Presbyterians.  
Even though I am part Scots-Irish by heritage, I don’t really consider them “real Irish.”  But they didn’t really consider themselves that either.  I think in much of the world people identified more by religion ethnicity than nations/geography until at least the First World War.   My husband’s family is Jewish and they didn’t even know which country their family came from.  And I think that’s also true of Greeks from Asia Minor or Albanians from Serbia, etc,.—the religion and ethnicity mattered more than the national borders until sometime in the 20th century.[/quote]

Look into the Spring of Nations. Most people associated more locally before than. Nationality was associated with nobles and royals. The monarch equaled the nation, hence the royal We. The common people were subjects not citizens. You can read memoirs of many people suddenly recognizing an ethnicity post Speing of Nations. Before then they didn’t think of themselves as Germans or Poles per se. (Situations varied to greater and lesser degrees in different parts of Europe.)

A similar phenomenon occurred here on a bigger scale with people identifying more with their state than as Amedican. So you’d have people here identying more as being Pennysylvanian or Tennessean than American. So some of you with longer family histories in this country need to understand that your early Ancestors likely didn’t identify as Americans either but rather, eg, Virginians.

Ultimately, it is a matter of personal identity for most of us that is separate from our citizenship.[/quote]

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