Re: OT Ethnotypes WAS Re: FWD [OT but interesting]....

John Cowan wrote:


>From Chapter 1 of _Thrones, Dominations_ by Dorothy L. Sayers
(posthumously) and
>Jill Paton Walsh.  A Frenchman (who begins it) and an Englishman are
>talking:
>
>'I beg your pardon; I had for the moment forgotten that you also
>were English.  You have so much the outlook, as well as the accent of
>a Frenchman.'
>
>'Thank you,' replied Mr Delagardie.  'I am actually only one-eighth
>French by blood.  The other seven-eighths is English, and the proof is
>that I take what you have said as a compliment.  Unlike the Jews, the
>Irish and the Germans, the English are pleased to be thought even more
>mongrel and exotic than they are.  It appeals to the streak of romantic
>sensibility in the English temperament.  Tell an Englishman that he is
>pure-bred Anglo-Saxon or a hundred per cent Aryan, and he will laugh in
>your face; tell him that his remote ancestry contains a blend of French,
>Russian, Chinese or even Arab or Hindu, and he will listen with polite
>gratification.  The remoter, of course, the better; it is more picturesque,
>and less socially ambiguous.'
>
>'Socially ambiguous? Ah! you admit, then, that the Englishman in fact
>despises all other races but his own.'
>
>'Until he has had time to assimilate them.  What he despises is not other
>races but other civilisations.  He does not wish to be called a dago
[Spaniard];
>but if he is born with dark eyes and an olive complexion, he is pleased
>to trace those features back to a Spanish hidalgo, cast away upon the
>English coast in the wreck of the Great Armada.  Everything with us is
>a matter of sentiment and association.'
>
Very amusing.  My gr-grandfather's history of our family turns out to have
been quite accurate at least back to our first appearance in US records
(around 1790s for the Mills side).  Beyond that, it's somewhat
embroidered..... The proto-Mills was supposedly a young Welshman (doesn't
sound like a Welsh name, somehow) who was shanghaied and brought to this
country.  He was, of course, the son of a nobleman, so somewhere in
England/Wales an ancestral estate awaits us.....

The first known US Mills, however, does seem to have lived in a
Welsh/English settlement in Western Pennsylvania, and married the dau. of a
neighboring family, named Phillips (again, not very Welsh sounding-- tho
they did have a son named Evan).  What, if anything, was going on in Wales
in the mid 1700s that would have induced presumably English residents to
emigrate???  Or just general poverty? :-)

GGF's mother was a Westfall-- a very well documented and prolific family,
though murky, since many male children were named either Jacob or
Cornelius.. Supposedly 2 brothers of a tyrannical Duke of Westphalia rose up
against him, failed, and had to flee to this country.  In fact, the first
Westphal/Westfall was a 14 year old Dutch lad named Jurian Bestevael or
Vestevael etc. who arrived here in 1642 as an indentured servant. So much
for family myths.......

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