What Is It With Americans and Their Obsession With Ancestry?
In Portugal nobody cares or has even a clue where we come from, and all we know is that we are from planet Earth.
Maybe this is something that all the “new” countries have. America (the continent, my dears, the continent, not the utopian dream), Australia, New Zealand, Canada, putting the natives aside; they all came from somewhere on a boat or a plane.
I came from my mother’s womb, which came from her mother’s, and you know where this is going. Surely we would all like to know more about our grandparents. In Portugal, I only go so far, my grandparents. And then, because of the lack of a trace, because there’s no record, we have no idea, but we couldn’t care less.
Where do I come from? I come from Portugal. I am Portuguese, and in itself, this is all I need to know. Being Portuguese is already almost in itself what matters.
However, whenever I meet Americans from the U.S.A. — let me be obvious here — they all, but really all, have this tendency and the absolute need to know where they came from.
“My family is half Jewish,” or “my ancestors came somewhere from Scotland,” said an American who shared a house with me once, immediately asking where my ancestors came from.
