As someone very interested in family history, and in fact am in the early stages of writing a novel about one family’s search for its roots, I have looked at a lot of British census material. At the moment family records can only be viewed on the censuses from 1841 to 1911. Those census records contain a lot of material and information, which increases as the decades go by; however. although the country of birth is recorded, there is no mention of ethnicity.
I was looking at some information the other day about the ethnicity of the USA; it was not recorded on the 20101 census but I was surprised at the results of the 2000 census. If asked, I guessed that many people would have identified themselves as Black or African-American, or Spanish or Hispanic, or English or Irish or Scottish. I might also have said that I thought there would be a significant number of Italian heritage people, and that tragically there were fewer people who had Native American heritage.
These are the figures of the census:
- 49,206,934 Germans
- 41,284,752 Black or African-Americans
- 35,523,082 Irish
- 31,789,483 Mexican
- 26,923,091 English
- 19,911,467 Americans
- 17,558,598 Italian
- 9,739,653 Polish
- 9,136,092 French
I would be interested to see similar data about the United Kingdom… including details of what people think their heritage is going back centuries; for example my father-in-law was sure his family were Norman, coming to England post 1066. My father thought we had Scandinavian ancestry and I know for a fact we have Jewish ancestry. I guess all of us want to know where we came from, where our roots are!
Lois Elsden 
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