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Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making by Samuel P. Orth
page 24 of 224 (10%)
To this method of estimating nationality, it will at once be objected
that undue prominence is given to the derivation of the surname, an
objection fully understood by those who made the estimate and one
which deprives their conclusions of strict scientific verity. In a new
country, where the population is in a constant flux and where members
of community composed of one race easily migrate to another part of
the country and fall in with people of another race, it is very easy
to modify the name to suit new circumstances. We know, for instance
that Isaac Isaacks of Pennsylvania was not a Jew, that the Van
Buskirks of New Jersey were German, not Dutch, that D'Aubigné was
early shortened into Dabny and Aulnay into Olney. So also many a Brown
had been Braun, and several Blacks had once been only Schwartz. Even
the universal Smith had absorbed more than one original Schmidt. These
rather exceptional cases, however, probably, do not vitiate the
general conclusion here made as to the British and non-British element
in the population of America, for the Dutch, the German, the French,
and the Swedish cognomens are characteristically different from the
British. But the differentiation between Irish, Welsh, Scotch,
Scotch-Irish, and English names is infinitely more difficult. The
Scotch-Irish particularly have challenged the conclusions reached by
the Census Bureau. They claim a much larger proportion of the
original bulk of our population than the seven per cent included under
the heading Scotch. Henry Jones Ford considers the conclusions as far
as they pertain to the Scotch-Irish as "fallacious and untrustworthy."
"Many Ulster names," he says,[5] "are also common English names....
Names classed as Scotch or Irish were probably mostly those of
Scotch-Irish families.... The probability is that the English
proportion should be much smaller and that the Scotch-Irish, who are
not included in the Census Bureau's classification, should be much
larger than the combined proportions allotted to the Scotch and the
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