I'm curious what ancestral backgrounds do you have. Do they define who you are culturally? How come?
I'm like chicken soup... My *recent* roots (that is from the 19th and 20th centuries) are Slovak, French (Alsacian) Irish, German, English, and Welsh. But the most recent ancestor are my Slovak ones who came to Pennsylvania in the early 1910s before WWI killed off the former Austro-Hungarian empire. That's my paternal grandma's parents and she could speak Slovak early in her life, but now she forgot how to speak it well due to lack of interactions to other Slovaks (she could only understand when someone speaks to her in Slovak, but cannot reply right). She doesn't really expose me to her parents' culture, so it has nothing to do with my identity. Personally, I'm very culturally American. I act American like anyone else and I don't really feel much in common with my European cousins. That's why I always say I am culturally American with (*insert adjectives*) origins. But I cannot say my Welsh roots from my mother's side did not influence me at all. My mother used to take me to a Welsh church with her parents and my great-grandmother, a daughter of a Welsh immigrant, always told me stories of Wales and her father. She had a lot of Welsh items in her house and proud of it. My mother's church always hold a Welsh cookie baking week where I would enjoy them. Since my grandparents and great-grandma died several years ago, I took up the tradition of making those cookies every March 1st - which is St David's Day in Wales, a Welsh version of St. Patrick's Day. So yeah, that has somewhat an influence on me, but not on who I am.
Now my older roots go even much further than the 19th and 20th centuries. That's where my English roots come up the most as I am descended from the first settlers of Massachusetts from the 1620s and 1630s (yes, the Purtians and Pilgrims!). They lived throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island before eventually one of the branches settled in the northeastern part of Pennsylvania. Then before those settlers, one of my ancestors were related to the English royal family (connecting me directly to King Edward III of England from the 12th century). So that makes me related to many royal families and nobles in Europe all the way back to the Dark Ages (even the Roman times!). So I'm Queen Betty II's long-lost cousin. lol But I don't really feel any special about this because many Europeans have some royal roots from the Middle Ages...so no one is that unique. Plus, also I have Pennsylvania Dutch roots, possibly at least from the first settlers of Pennsylvania after William Penn founded the colony in the 1680s.
So yeah, that's my family history. I'm curious what are yours?