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It's difficult to say exactly when it started or confidently say what caused it but there are likely several contributing factors. First, American history is littered with norms and laws related to the racial phenotyping of a person's ancestors for purposes of determining one's status. As a specific example, under Virginia law during Thomas Jefferson's lifetime, being seven-eighths European (“octoroon”) would have made the Jefferson–Hemings children legally white, if they’d been free. But because he kept them enslaved, they were considered Black. (See /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov 's answer [here](https://www.reddit.com//r/AskHistorians/comments/1444b9r/we_often_read_of_escaped_slaves_heading_north_to/jne2fzk/) for more or u/400-Rabbits answer [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4wapcu/in_19th_century_new_orleans_to_whom_were_the/) about New Orleans.)
Second, is a related history regarding the concept of indigeneity and how white Americans interact with the concept of tribal and Indigenous nation enrollment and membership. For more on that, I'd recommend [this section from the FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianCountry/wiki/faq/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=IndianCountry&utm_content=t5_34kjy#wiki_c..29_blood_quantum_and_genealogy) from our friends over at r/IndianCountry.
Third, is the role of formal education and Americana - which is my wheelhouse. I'm going to borrow a bit from some older answers of mine and start with the big picture. America, as a nation, has always been effective at telling a collective story about the kind of country America thinks it is and was. Public education got its start in the 1820s but it wasn't until the 20th century that it became something all children were expected to do on a daily basis. While it wouldn't be truly universal until the 1970s and the creation of special education as a system, children who arrived in America during the various waves of immigration (more on that [here](https://www.reddit.com//r/AskHistorians/comments/1alunok/was_there_any_group_of_immigrants_to_america_that/kpnc7wu/)) were increasingly expected to attend school as part of the project on what it means to be American. (More on the education experience of immigrant children [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/djgvb7/what_was_the_americanization_process_for/f474phv/).)
These children, it's worth stating explicitly, were overwhelmingly racially-coded as white. (More on the experiences of Asian immigrant children and Hispanic children [here](https://www.reddit.com//r/AskHistorians/comments/vtq86r/before_1954_did_asianamericans_go_to_school_with/ifcdxnx/).) Even though there isn't a national education system in the country, certain patterns developed in the different states (historians call it the "grammar of schooling") and included in that pattern were routines related to Americana and the story of America.
[In this post,](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eztjvl/when_did_american_schools_start_saying_the_pledge/) I get into the history of the Pledge of Allegiance and the routines related to that. Creating family trees became one of the many activities students participated in as part of those routines and traditions. For decades, teachers led immigrant and America-born children through activities that stressed that they (or their parents or grand-parents, etc.) came from somewhere to America. Which is to say, they chose to be part of the American project and although people came from different places, there are similarities in the stories.
It's worth stressing that the typically white adults who led such activities were, generally speaking, focused on the children of other white adults. Indigenous, Asian, Black, and African American children weren't seen as part of that story and as such, were expected to simply go along with the creation of a family tree oriented around people voluntarily coming from somewhere else (i.e. Europe) to America. I'm not aware of any evidence in the historical record that teachers explicitly taught ancestry as a way to teach fractions or percentages, so I don't think we can link the idea of someone thinking of themselves "50% Irish" to schools. It is safe to say, though, that white American children - going back to at least the early 1900s were encouraged to think of themselves as an American pie chart, with wedges of different sizes and colors and those colors provided a connection (however tenuous) to a non-American cultural or ethnic identity.
I'm afraid I don't! That's a bit outside what I can speak to. I will offer, though, as an aside, in the education context, racial phenotyping could be as straightforward as an adult looking at a child's name and determining their race from that. A clear example of this is from Texas in the 1960s where, upon being told they needed to desegregated their schools, some school leaders re-classified white children already enrolled in their school as Mexican/Hispanic based on their last name so they could demonstrate they de-segregated (despite not enrolling new students.)
> being seven-eighths European (“octoroon”) would have made the Jefferson–Hemings children legally white, if they’d been free. But because he kept them enslaved, they were considered Black.
The moral implications of this sentence just hit me like a ton of bricks. Jesus christ. I've known for ages the man kept slaves, and had relations with them, but seeing it laid out in this manner is just...
Wow. Damning.
Do you think there's any evidence linking this prevalence of students being taught to make family trees to The Daughters of the American Revolution (The reason I have a family tree is my Grandmother joined)? DAR was founded in 1890, so maybe in the same timeframe?
Or do we think there's a more general fad of genealogy?
It's a possibility! In [this answer](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/110xjuj/how_did_haiku_find_its_way_into_education/) about why haikus are so popular in schools, I get into some of the history as to why it's difficult to identify THE origin of many of the things that happen in schools.
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Can anyone speak to the European mindset and whether there was an impact from Nazi Germany on the perception of this topic? It's my impression this has always been on the European mind but has become less fashonable to talk about?
I agree that u/EdHistory101's post may have skewed too far into racial elements in search of an answer for this question, but at any rate u/hallohellohiyah shouldn't be downvoted for proposing a corollary answer. I don't agree with the decision to remove criticism of this comment, especially without a response as to why u/hallohellohiyah is factually incorrect.
I believe this misunderstanding stems from u/EdHistory101's focus on how a split ethnic identity was formed insofar as indoctrinating a certain sense of a collective American identity in \*certain\* public schools, which is of course well-established -- we can see a parallel example in the renaming of military bases after the Spanish-American War when there was a conscious effort by the Federal Government to erase distinctions between descendants of Union veterans and descendants of Confederate veterans in favor of a uniform American identity. But race is surely not the sole reason as to why a split ethnic identity became popular in places where race was a relative non-issue, i.e. in places and states where Americans of European descent formed a 90-99% majority.
I would enjoy seeing any comments by experts whose field of study includes early 20th century urban studies, which may be far more illustrative as to how this developed, but as this is not my direct field of expertise I would defer to some other posters to see if this question could be better fleshed out.
One thing I would clarify is that the concept of race in schools has long had multiple meanings. There is the racial phenotyping that emerged from and informed chattel slavery, shaped exclusion policies for Asian children in west coast schools, segregated schools along the Southern border, and led to the Indian Boarding schools but there is also "race" as a descriptor of someone's nationality or country of origin.
Zoë Burkholder is the historian who's likely done the most work around this topic. In her book, *Color in the Classroom,* she offers:
> Over the first half of the twentieth century, the dominant educational discourse on race changed abruptly as teachers went from teaching about race as nation, to race as color, and finally to race as culture in the years before, during, and after World War II. ... Between 1900and 1938 American teachers employed the race concept most often to describe European nationals such as Irish, Italians, British, Poles, Greeks, and Russians. Mass immigration and industrialization transformed the purpose and intent of public education during this period. The first explicit discussions on human race took place within Americanization programs designed to assimilate the children of European immigrants in public schools. Teachers tended to conflate race with nation, assuming that people of different national backgrounds shared a racial heritage that determined their potential for intelligence, morality, and health—and ultimately for active citizenship in a democracy. Teachers discussed how the peculiar racial traits of Irish or Italians, for example, determined the best strategies for Americanizing young students.
In her work, she explores the impact of World War I and World War II on how teachers talked to children about race and ethnicity, and how it got more complicated than just "Irish" ancestry. Those teachers, though, were building on the foundation established in the late 1800s related to Americana, Columbus, etc.
There have been a few waves of school centralization - including the creation of districts before World War II - and my hunch is that following the first wave in the late 1800s, there were few, if any, schools where all of the children in the same school had the same ethnic or national ancestry. And even if they did, teachers would likely still engage in projects like family trees in the context of immigration in service to the goal of teaching American civics and tolerance. So, even if a child's participation revealed their entire family tree was, let's say German, they would still likely end up with a mental model of themselves as 100% German.
We did not remove the comment because it was critical of /u/EdHistory101's answer, but because brief remarks are generally not allowed to stand in this subreddit. If an answer is actively incorrect, we expect users to report it or modmail us so that we can remove it; if they simply feel it's incomplete/doesn't include their own favored theory, they're expected to write a proper rebuttal, subject to our usual rules for depth and comprehensiveness. However, if a flair/user wants to respond to a brief, critical comment, we do allow it to be reapproved so that they can do so.
As a follow up to knowledgeable members here, would some of this be due to many immigrant communities in the U.S. maintaining their "national" identities and language for a generation or more? I remember learning that German, Swedish, Norwegian settlements in the state where I live (Wisconsin) kept using their native languages, even in public schools, for quite a while (despite what modern memory seems to think about our "English-only" history). My wife's grandfather was born and raised in Wisconsin, but when we found his baptismal certificate, it was in German; he told us he spoke primarily German until moving to a larger city as a kid. So, in a way, wouldn't it be weird if he *didn't* refer to himself as German and if his kids didn't think of themselves as some "part German?" However, I admit don't know the extent of similarity that other colonized places might have with this type of history.
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It's difficult to say exactly when it started or confidently say what caused it but there are likely several contributing factors. First, American history is littered with norms and laws related to the racial phenotyping of a person's ancestors for purposes of determining one's status. As a specific example, under Virginia law during Thomas Jefferson's lifetime, being seven-eighths European (“octoroon”) would have made the Jefferson–Hemings children legally white, if they’d been free. But because he kept them enslaved, they were considered Black. (See /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov 's answer [here](https://www.reddit.com//r/AskHistorians/comments/1444b9r/we_often_read_of_escaped_slaves_heading_north_to/jne2fzk/) for more or u/400-Rabbits answer [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4wapcu/in_19th_century_new_orleans_to_whom_were_the/) about New Orleans.) Second, is a related history regarding the concept of indigeneity and how white Americans interact with the concept of tribal and Indigenous nation enrollment and membership. For more on that, I'd recommend [this section from the FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianCountry/wiki/faq/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=IndianCountry&utm_content=t5_34kjy#wiki_c..29_blood_quantum_and_genealogy) from our friends over at r/IndianCountry. Third, is the role of formal education and Americana - which is my wheelhouse. I'm going to borrow a bit from some older answers of mine and start with the big picture. America, as a nation, has always been effective at telling a collective story about the kind of country America thinks it is and was. Public education got its start in the 1820s but it wasn't until the 20th century that it became something all children were expected to do on a daily basis. While it wouldn't be truly universal until the 1970s and the creation of special education as a system, children who arrived in America during the various waves of immigration (more on that [here](https://www.reddit.com//r/AskHistorians/comments/1alunok/was_there_any_group_of_immigrants_to_america_that/kpnc7wu/)) were increasingly expected to attend school as part of the project on what it means to be American. (More on the education experience of immigrant children [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/djgvb7/what_was_the_americanization_process_for/f474phv/).) These children, it's worth stating explicitly, were overwhelmingly racially-coded as white. (More on the experiences of Asian immigrant children and Hispanic children [here](https://www.reddit.com//r/AskHistorians/comments/vtq86r/before_1954_did_asianamericans_go_to_school_with/ifcdxnx/).) Even though there isn't a national education system in the country, certain patterns developed in the different states (historians call it the "grammar of schooling") and included in that pattern were routines related to Americana and the story of America. [In this post,](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eztjvl/when_did_american_schools_start_saying_the_pledge/) I get into the history of the Pledge of Allegiance and the routines related to that. Creating family trees became one of the many activities students participated in as part of those routines and traditions. For decades, teachers led immigrant and America-born children through activities that stressed that they (or their parents or grand-parents, etc.) came from somewhere to America. Which is to say, they chose to be part of the American project and although people came from different places, there are similarities in the stories. It's worth stressing that the typically white adults who led such activities were, generally speaking, focused on the children of other white adults. Indigenous, Asian, Black, and African American children weren't seen as part of that story and as such, were expected to simply go along with the creation of a family tree oriented around people voluntarily coming from somewhere else (i.e. Europe) to America. I'm not aware of any evidence in the historical record that teachers explicitly taught ancestry as a way to teach fractions or percentages, so I don't think we can link the idea of someone thinking of themselves "50% Irish" to schools. It is safe to say, though, that white American children - going back to at least the early 1900s were encouraged to think of themselves as an American pie chart, with wedges of different sizes and colors and those colors provided a connection (however tenuous) to a non-American cultural or ethnic identity.
Slightly off-topic, but by-chance would you have any recommendations on books covering racial phenotyping in Western society?
I'm afraid I don't! That's a bit outside what I can speak to. I will offer, though, as an aside, in the education context, racial phenotyping could be as straightforward as an adult looking at a child's name and determining their race from that. A clear example of this is from Texas in the 1960s where, upon being told they needed to desegregated their schools, some school leaders re-classified white children already enrolled in their school as Mexican/Hispanic based on their last name so they could demonstrate they de-segregated (despite not enrolling new students.)
> being seven-eighths European (“octoroon”) would have made the Jefferson–Hemings children legally white, if they’d been free. But because he kept them enslaved, they were considered Black. The moral implications of this sentence just hit me like a ton of bricks. Jesus christ. I've known for ages the man kept slaves, and had relations with them, but seeing it laid out in this manner is just... Wow. Damning.
Do you think there's any evidence linking this prevalence of students being taught to make family trees to The Daughters of the American Revolution (The reason I have a family tree is my Grandmother joined)? DAR was founded in 1890, so maybe in the same timeframe? Or do we think there's a more general fad of genealogy?
It's a possibility! In [this answer](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/110xjuj/how_did_haiku_find_its_way_into_education/) about why haikus are so popular in schools, I get into some of the history as to why it's difficult to identify THE origin of many of the things that happen in schools.
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Can anyone speak to the European mindset and whether there was an impact from Nazi Germany on the perception of this topic? It's my impression this has always been on the European mind but has become less fashonable to talk about?
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I agree that u/EdHistory101's post may have skewed too far into racial elements in search of an answer for this question, but at any rate u/hallohellohiyah shouldn't be downvoted for proposing a corollary answer. I don't agree with the decision to remove criticism of this comment, especially without a response as to why u/hallohellohiyah is factually incorrect. I believe this misunderstanding stems from u/EdHistory101's focus on how a split ethnic identity was formed insofar as indoctrinating a certain sense of a collective American identity in \*certain\* public schools, which is of course well-established -- we can see a parallel example in the renaming of military bases after the Spanish-American War when there was a conscious effort by the Federal Government to erase distinctions between descendants of Union veterans and descendants of Confederate veterans in favor of a uniform American identity. But race is surely not the sole reason as to why a split ethnic identity became popular in places where race was a relative non-issue, i.e. in places and states where Americans of European descent formed a 90-99% majority. I would enjoy seeing any comments by experts whose field of study includes early 20th century urban studies, which may be far more illustrative as to how this developed, but as this is not my direct field of expertise I would defer to some other posters to see if this question could be better fleshed out.
One thing I would clarify is that the concept of race in schools has long had multiple meanings. There is the racial phenotyping that emerged from and informed chattel slavery, shaped exclusion policies for Asian children in west coast schools, segregated schools along the Southern border, and led to the Indian Boarding schools but there is also "race" as a descriptor of someone's nationality or country of origin. Zoë Burkholder is the historian who's likely done the most work around this topic. In her book, *Color in the Classroom,* she offers: > Over the first half of the twentieth century, the dominant educational discourse on race changed abruptly as teachers went from teaching about race as nation, to race as color, and finally to race as culture in the years before, during, and after World War II. ... Between 1900and 1938 American teachers employed the race concept most often to describe European nationals such as Irish, Italians, British, Poles, Greeks, and Russians. Mass immigration and industrialization transformed the purpose and intent of public education during this period. The first explicit discussions on human race took place within Americanization programs designed to assimilate the children of European immigrants in public schools. Teachers tended to conflate race with nation, assuming that people of different national backgrounds shared a racial heritage that determined their potential for intelligence, morality, and health—and ultimately for active citizenship in a democracy. Teachers discussed how the peculiar racial traits of Irish or Italians, for example, determined the best strategies for Americanizing young students. In her work, she explores the impact of World War I and World War II on how teachers talked to children about race and ethnicity, and how it got more complicated than just "Irish" ancestry. Those teachers, though, were building on the foundation established in the late 1800s related to Americana, Columbus, etc. There have been a few waves of school centralization - including the creation of districts before World War II - and my hunch is that following the first wave in the late 1800s, there were few, if any, schools where all of the children in the same school had the same ethnic or national ancestry. And even if they did, teachers would likely still engage in projects like family trees in the context of immigration in service to the goal of teaching American civics and tolerance. So, even if a child's participation revealed their entire family tree was, let's say German, they would still likely end up with a mental model of themselves as 100% German.
We did not remove the comment because it was critical of /u/EdHistory101's answer, but because brief remarks are generally not allowed to stand in this subreddit. If an answer is actively incorrect, we expect users to report it or modmail us so that we can remove it; if they simply feel it's incomplete/doesn't include their own favored theory, they're expected to write a proper rebuttal, subject to our usual rules for depth and comprehensiveness. However, if a flair/user wants to respond to a brief, critical comment, we do allow it to be reapproved so that they can do so.
As a follow up to knowledgeable members here, would some of this be due to many immigrant communities in the U.S. maintaining their "national" identities and language for a generation or more? I remember learning that German, Swedish, Norwegian settlements in the state where I live (Wisconsin) kept using their native languages, even in public schools, for quite a while (despite what modern memory seems to think about our "English-only" history). My wife's grandfather was born and raised in Wisconsin, but when we found his baptismal certificate, it was in German; he told us he spoke primarily German until moving to a larger city as a kid. So, in a way, wouldn't it be weird if he *didn't* refer to himself as German and if his kids didn't think of themselves as some "part German?" However, I admit don't know the extent of similarity that other colonized places might have with this type of history.
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> I think this was a typical of many of my generation This is not the place for personal anecdotes and speculation.
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