Great mapping of the ancestry results from the 1990 census. It’s fun to see where everyone ends up:

The Finns in northeastern Minnesota (and the Swedes and the Norwegians who each went a few miles further west), the Poles along the Great Lakes (and in central Nebraska), the Slovaks in Pittsburgh, the Belgians in the Upper Peninsula, the Czechs in central Texas (where they thankfully make Shiner Beer), the famous Utah Danes, the western Iowa Dutch, the Germans all over the Midwest, the Michael Dukakis-led Greeks of Massachusetts, the Irish in Boston and Mississippi (!), the Italians in Jersey, and finally the English, who despite once owning the damned country, seem to have left their mark disproportionately in Maine and Utah.

Finally, of interest to my Cajuncentric worldview, we have the French and French Canadian maps, both of which leave south Louisiana swimming in a sea of red. (And which also serve to prove that (a) the southeast Texas border counties are almost as Cajun as south Louisiana, and (b) north Louisiana is really just southern Arkansas and nothing to get excited about.)

I should also point out that the 1990 census also included “Acadian” as a separate ancestry category (although I can’t find a map for it). I’ve got no doubt that category had a similar, although more pronounced pattern (with perhaps a flicker of color in Maine or Massachusetts).

30 September 2003

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