I knew an undocumented couple from Mexico living in the US.

[wnylib]

20. My mother's parents were immigrants from

the German Empire as very young children in 1888 and 1890. Well, actually, her father was born in Buffalo 2 weeks after his parents arrived after fleeing Germany as political refugees. (For being liberals. It's in my blood, I guess.) But he got started in Germany (West Prussia). LOL. Her mother was 3 years old when she arrived with parents and siblings from the German Empire (Mecklenburg-Schwerin). They had been Dutch a couple centuries earlier, before settling in Mecklenburg.

My mother's parents spoke German at home so when her brother served in the US Army in Europe during WWII, he got assignments that involved knowledge of the language and customs. Was captured and spent 2 years in a German POW camp.

I found records for the British side of my paternal grandmother's family going back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636, and further back a few centuries mostly in England, with a couple Welsh and Scots in the mix. One line includes the first Protestant martyr burned at the stake by Bloody Queen Mary.

So even the Brits were a mix of Anglo-Saxons, Norman French, Scots, Welsh. The Norman lines go back to Scandinavia. My favorite ancestor's name in that line is Olaf the Woodcutter (which I like to pronounce with a Swedish lilt).

The other side of her family were already in North America when Europeans arrived (Seneca and Mohawk).

My paternal grandfather's family were German Swiss on one side and Algonquin on the other.

When you go back far enough, none of us are "pure" anything.