Growing up in the US is both a blessing and a curse. It is truly the great equalizer. Three generations after coming here and it no longer matters if your family were peasants or noblemen... French or English. My family in recent times consists of my mother's parents (Irish, Scottish, and French) and my father's parents (Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian) which eventually led to me. Looking at the countries I am sure you notice they are all very separate cultures. So for some the search for their ancestry helps them to pin down a cultural heritage, for me it has just expanded the already large tree of known places my family has come from.
Looking through that one added section of family tree I can add, England, Spain, Egypt, different parts of the Middle East, Switzerland, Belgium, Norwegian, and the list continues to grow.I think it's all very cool to see the different places people merged from to make me, but it also makes me feel less and less connected to any culture. My family comes from a merging of people across the globe which is probably why we don't do anything that displays a heritage. We're American in the broadest sense of the word, I think being part of the new American Culture (which I find to be hysterical, because America itself doesn't have much of a "Culture"...) means distancing yourself from everything your family once knew or did in order to fit in. I realize they could not keep the exact same lifestyle an ocean away, but when America began to become a melting pot and people from all different nations began to arrive two things happened.
At first people lived only with people from their respective countries. We had a section for Italians, Russians, Irish men, etc. Slowly but surely things began to change. I wasn't alive for this, so I'm not sure when the change took place, but I can guess it was the second or third generation that did it. If you'd have asked my great-great grandfather he'd tell you. He told my mother that ancestry did not matter when his family came to this country. Everyone interbred with everyone. I'm not quoting, because I don't remember his exact words, but they were to that effect. So from the beginning of time you had folks from many different backgrounds combining into one family unit out of love? Necessity? Survival? That meant being respectful of the others backgrounds or sometimes, as in my parents case, just ignoring that you are both from different backgrounds and celebrate neither heritage.
Any one else experiencing this same phenomenon? I know they elude to it in the ancestry.com commercial. Though the man in the commercial found he was mostly Irish and was happier with those traditions. I've found I'm just to much of everything and not enough of one thing. This feeling sometimes leads to feelings of being alone. I want a community to be a part of and in America that doesn't happen. I feel like all I might have is a cultural community, because I left the church due to a personal disagreement on their stance pertaining to certain subjects. So I lost that community. No one talks to neighbors anymore. I feel like my world has become smaller as people began to hide behind smart phones and we have more long distance relationships. A cultural community may have been all I had and I don't even have that in America? So what am I left with? Who is there to back me? Does anyone else have these feelings?
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