I watched part of a Channel 4 programme called 100% English about 8 people who believe themselves to be truly English because they are English by blood.
DNA testing showed that they were largely wrong in this assertion, but it seems strange that anyone should hold being descended from just one of the many immigrant groups to come to these islands over the last three or four millennia confers some sort of superior right upon them to regard themselves as the true English people.
On the whole I think that I am quintessentially English in that just one half of my traceable ancestry is English, one quarter Belgian and one eighth each Irish and Welsh; added to that there are unconfirmed family legends that some part of my Belgian ancestry was Jewish, while the names on the Irish branch would suggest Scottish origins.
lizdavies
I saw it too; it was really interesting, but not at all surprising.
I am fairly English, if you look at my nearest ancestors. I'm 7/8ths Lincolnshire and 1/8th Yorkshire by my gt grandparents, but in the next generation there's Cumbrian blood, the one after that brings in Notts, Kentish and Scottish and I know I've got a French huguenot a few generations further along. And my Uncle Michael, half of whose DNA I share, had his tested, and we have a smidge of Chinese mixed in somewhere. so there you are.