Celebrities with German Roots

Where German ancestry comes from

Early farmers appeared in what is now Germany 8,000 to 7,000 years ago. A study of DNA from 69 ancient Europeans, published in 2015, found them closely related to the first farmers of Hungary and Spain and distinct from the hunter-gatherers who lived there before. About 4,500 years ago, the people of the Corded Ware culture in Germany traced three quarters of their ancestry to the Yamnaya, herders from the steppe of what is now Russia. The authors see this as evidence of “a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery.” Steppe ancestry persisted in all the Central Europeans they sampled until at least 3,000 years ago, and it is found throughout Europe today.^[5]

The population of eastern Germany changed again in the early Middle Ages. In 2025 a team that analyzed 555 ancient genomes reported that migrants from Eastern Europe replaced more than 80% of the local gene pool in eastern Germany, Poland and Croatia during the 6th to 8th centuries. Today German speakers in Saxony carry around 40% of this Eastern European ancestry. Among the Sorbs of Upper Lusatia, a Slavic-speaking minority, the share is 88%, about the same as among Poles. The authors think the lower share among German speakers is probably connected with the Frankish conquest and with German-speaking settlement east of the Elbe and Saale rivers from the 12th century onward.^[6]

From many states to one Germany

After the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806, the Congress of Vienna created the German Confederation in 1815. It began with 35 sovereign principalities and four free cities. Austria and Prussia belonged to it only with the lands that had been part of the old empire.^[7]

The German Empire was proclaimed on January 18, 1871. Its constitution, passed on April 16, lists 25 member states, from Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg to the cities of Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg.^[8] Today the Federal Republic is made up of 16 states, the Länder.^[1]

How black, red and gold became the national colors

Where the colors come from cannot be traced with certainty. After 1815 they were linked to the black uniforms with red trim and gold buttons of the Lützow Free Corps, a unit that had fought against Napoleon. Their national appeal came mainly from the mistaken belief that they had been the colors of the old empire. Many participants at the Hambach Festival of 1832 carried black, red and gold flags. The colors became a symbol of national unity and civil liberty and were almost everywhere during the revolution of 1848–49.^[9]

In 1848 the Federal Diet in Frankfurt and the National Assembly declared black, red and gold the colors of the German Confederation and of the empire they meant to found. The empire of 1871 chose black, white and red, the colors of Prussia with the red of the Hanseatic cities. The National Assembly in Weimar made black, red and gold the colors of the Reich in 1919. Thirty years later the Parliamentary Council adopted them for the Federal Republic, with one vote against.^[9] Article 22 of the Basic Law fixes them as the colors of the federal flag.^[1] East Germany used the same colors and from 1959 added its emblem with hammer and compass. On October 3, 1990, the black, red and gold flag became the flag of reunified Germany.^[9]

From Germantown to the Great Plains

In 1688 four German Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, wrote a petition against slavery to their monthly meeting. It was the first protest of its kind in the British North American colonies. They asked their fellow Quakers to treat others as they would want to be treated, “macking no difference of what generation, descent or Colour they are.”^[10]

In the 18th century about 81,000 German speakers from Central Europe, Switzerland included, settled in southeastern Pennsylvania. Of these, 96% were Lutheran or German Reformed.^[11] In 1751 Benjamin Franklin, worried by their numbers, asked why Pennsylvania, “founded by the English,” should “become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them”.^[12]

The language of these settlers, Pennsylvania Dutch, is closest to the dialects of the southeastern Palatinate near Mannheim.^[11] The linguist Mark L. Louden traces the name to an older usage, in which “both Dutch and German could refer to speakers of what we would today call German.”^[13] The Amish and Old Order Mennonites are the last groups who still pass the language on to their children.^[11] In 2026 the Amish population of North America was estimated at 421,200.^[14]

Most German immigrants arrived in the 19th century.^[15] For Wisconsin, the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies describes three waves. In the 1850s the newcomers came mainly from the south and west, from Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, the Rhineland and the Palatinate, driven by hardship on the farms and overpopulation. Liberal intellectuals who fled after the failed revolutions of 1848–49 came with them. From 1865 to 1875 settlers arrived from Schleswig, Holstein, Hanover and Westphalia, many of them farmers hit by a slump caused by cheap American wheat. The largest wave, in the 1880s, brought farm laborers and craftsmen from Brandenburg and Pomerania in the north and east.^[16]

Other German Americans came by way of Russia. In 1763 Catherine the Great invited Germans to settle her lands on the Volga, promising freedom from taxes and from military service. Between 1763 and 1768 more than 25,000 Germans founded 104 colonies along the Volga and Karaman rivers. In 1871 Tsar Alexander II revoked their exemption from military service. The first group left for Kansas in 1875 and settled on railroad land in Ellis and Rush counties.^[17]

German in America and the First World War

On the eve of World War I, 8.7% of all Americans had been born in Germany or had at least one German-born parent.^[18] Wisconsin alone had almost 100 German-language newspapers when the United States entered the war in 1917.^[19] Most German Americans stood with their country, but anti-German sentiment spread. Schools stopped teaching German, place names were changed and German-language newspapers closed.^[18]

In 1919 Nebraska banned teaching in any language other than English and allowed foreign languages as a subject only after the eighth grade. In 1920 a teacher at a Lutheran parochial school in Hamilton County taught a ten-year-old to read German from a collection of Bible stories and was convicted under the law. The Supreme Court reversed the conviction in Meyer v. Nebraska in 1923. “The protection of the Constitution extends to all, to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue,” the court wrote.^[20]

Finding German ancestors in the records

The instructions for the 1870 US census read, “Instead of ‘Germany,’ specify the State, as Prussia, Baden, Bavaria, Wurttemburg, Hesse Darmstadt, etc.”^[21] In Germany itself, register offices have recorded every birth, marriage and death since 1874 in Prussia and since 1876 in the rest of the empire.^[22] German speakers of the 19th century wrote in Kurrent, an old form of cursive, and read print set in Fraktur.^[23]

More than 7 million emigrants left Europe by ship through Bremen and Bremerhaven in the 19th and 20th centuries. Bremen kept its older passenger lists for only a few years for lack of space, and most were destroyed. Complete series survive only for 1907–08, 1913–14 and 1920–1939. The lists from Hamburg are better preserved and cover 1850 to 1934.^[24]