In Geneology, do you claim any ancestry that you can document?

Question

Can you claim you are part (insert), even if you would be like 1/500th (insert)?

Answer 1

Sure.  As long as I am talking to another genealogist, who is as interested as I am, in "wow, look how far back I was able to trace".  Normally, they will come back with what THEY are 1/500th of.

Mechanics will spend 3 hours, discussing the merits of different spark plug brands. Me, if the car runs, I don't care.

Would I put that on a job application, or document that is not concerned with tracing ancestry?  No. They are usually wanting to know what you are MAYBE 1/4th of.. further back than that, they don't care.

Falls into the category of "time and place for everything".

edit-

Thought Bandit may not realize that this is what we do in the genealogy section.  More Americans "do" that, for the simple reason that most of our ancestry comes from somewhere else.

Answer 2

Are you American? I notice that the Americans are much more into defining things like this than other folk are.

Where are you going to be claiming this? If you want to go down the pub and say "Bet you guys never realized that I'm part Irish?" then go for it, it's not like anyone's really going to give a d**n anyway.

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It's not just in the genealogy section, I see it asked all the time here - do I look black, am I part Spanish, guess my ethnicity, is my friend really white? etc

And while genealogists are interested in tracing these ancestors it doesn't mean they define themselves as being of that nationality or ethnicity.

I'm not going to go around saying that I'm part French just because I've got some Huguenot dude in my tree.

Answer 3

Absolutely.  In a few very narrow cases, such information could be extremely valuable, if you can document it.

On the other hand, a very minor percentage of ancestry from a certain area of the world is likely to be completely unnoticeable in who you are.