Comments by "Henning Bartels" (@henningbartels6245) on "German Heritage in the USA | Feli from Germany" video.

Germany as a nation state came about in 1871. So details at the entry to the United States could be confusing - depending on which time the came. Immigrants from the Alsace region could be registered as German in on decade and as French in the next. Austrians or Swiss could be registered seperately or as German as well... and so on. Simular to the dna results: it is very hard for those commercial tests to tell Germans, Austrians, South Tyrolian, Swiss, Nothern French, Belgian, Luxembourgian or Dutch apart if not impossible by those genetic traces. Often they are just grouped together.
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I wonder, how someone could be 16% German by ancestry?! So, one of your grandparents was German, but had a Polish leg? ;-)
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@IanZainea1990 2048 - so that is 12 generations before you? I wonder if you have the exact records of these 328?! And one out of 2048 is such a tiny portion, that it is propably not error-free messurable at some doubtful dna tests.
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@IanZainea1990 wow, that's pretty intense knowlegde of your ancestory. with some luck I would get 6 generation of my family together ... and there could be even some gaps. Being from Germany, I would not even be sure, if my great-great-grandfather would call himself "German" or rather "Prussian" or "Brunswicker".
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Ihle is a name of small river in my home region in Northern Central Germany. German family names appeared around 1500s. Most of the times they name the profession people had: Schmidt (=smith), Müller (=miller), Mayer (=farm tendant or cheese maker), Schulze (mayor) , but also Eisenhower (from Eisenhauer= iron smith) or Hoover (from Huber=independent farmer). Then follow by names which are characteristics like Klein (or Cline = small), Schwarzkopf (=black head) or Braun (=brown), but also patronyms like Petersen (son of Peter) or Wilke (son of William) and finally where people came from when they moved and therefore geographical places like Kissinger (probably originally from the town of Kissingen) or even from the area of the river Ihle.
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yes, maybe you can find traces of German heritage in the States, but very little ... and in my opinion, compared to the big number of German immigrants they left fairly little impact on the USA of today. I guess, it could be partly because they were never the ruling class and at times rather looked down on like the Irish. In other areas of Europe where German settled through the centuries they often left a larger food print. It is also strange regarding that Germans were often proud craftmen, there is fairly little to be recognized in the US ... except maybe for beer brewing and breweries or for musical instrument building like Steinway & Sons. I'm myself are from the birthplace of General von Steuben: Magdeburg - which was also the bithplace of the Ecke family who were the first who commercially bred pointsettia and made it to the popular christmas plant which it is today.
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