Do you come from peasant stock?

Peasant. Mennonites, specifically.

Yes. Italian peasants on both sides. In another era or situation, I would be stomping grapes.

Peasant. English South West. I’d be making cheddar cheese and brewing cider.

I hate peasant stock. Too salty. I just use water instead.

Partially. Three of my grandparents were themselves grandchildren of peasants or laborers in foreign countries (Sweden, Ireland, and Germany).

My paternal grandfather, however, was descended from ministers and educators who had been in the US from Scotland since the 1820s and before.

Came from upper class in the old country and now decidedly upper middle class

Parents were both European peasants who came here to escape gridding poverty.. I thank God every day I was born here. Sucks in a lot of ways due to inequality and ruthlessness of capitalism - but all of my siblings and I would be considered filthy rich by my parents standards in their hometowns.

Descended from Irish bog-trotting trash, English West Country scrumpy-drunken yokels, and pig-snouted German miners.

Not a drop of fine-featured aristo in me.

I am an ameoba.

Peasant. Scottish Highlanders, Northern Irish penniless trash, and Northern Italian mountain trash.

I'm fascinated by how specific ethnic *trash* is.

Oh yeah! Frankly I think most white Americans are, their ancestors were the ones who wanted to get the hell away from wherever they were born, the aristocrats and anyone else who had a decent quality of life stayed put.

IMHO that's one of many factors that makes Americans so damn prone to obesity. They're descended from people who needed to survive periods of starvation, and here they are leading sedentary stress-filled lifestyles and eating horrible processed food designed to stimulate cravings. That's not a good combination with "thrifty" genes that want to store every spare calorie.

Vas is this peasant you speak of?

Both. A few Earls and Baronets and a few farmers. The only real advantage to coming from titled ancestors is the documentation, invaluable to a genealogist.

Peasant. Italian. South of Naples on the coast.

Great, simple Italian peasant fare as a bonus.

Aristocracy on my father's side, (English/Dutch). English farmers on my mother's side.

On my mother's side, I'm actually related to Lucille Ball. Mom's great-great something was a Ball from that same family. (Deep into genealogy, my partner is.)

On my father's side he had Spencer ancestry and there's a definite connection to the Spencers from which Princess Diana came. On his mother's side, her ancestors, both paternal and maternal were Mayflower families and she was related through her father to Elliott Fitch Shepard, who was a New York lawyer, banker, and owner of the Mail and Express newspaper, as well as a founder and president of the New York State Bar Association. He married Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt.

However all that doesn't make me any better or any worse. IT's just kind of interesting. I am what I am.

Difficult, both peasant and upper class. My great-great grandfather came from a dynasty of rich russian artists and political figures that essentially elevated him and his family into celebrity status, but they fled during the revolution and relocated to germany, where he fell in love with a lower class woman who worked at a factory. Together they fled the fall of the Weimar Republic and made their way to America to have my grandfather, who himself became an artist and animator for Disney and had one of his original short films screened at Cannes in the 50’s.

Sorry, meant to say great grandfather, not great-great grandfather.

As a first generation American Ron of European peasants, I am fascinated by the entitlement of being a multi-generation WASP. Even though I can - and have - passed for an upper middle class WASP my whole life, it’s like passing as a light skinned black person. People assume i come from a wealthy WASP family but both parents were European peasants. But growing up in a relatively wealthy WASP town taught me all I needed to know to pass. It’s helped me a ton in my career.

R19, are you Martha Stewart?

I have so much trouble completing any of my tasks I think I come from vegetable stock.

Apparently I've heard that those of either peasant and aristocratic ancestry are more prone to addictions such as drinking, and that those usually descended from the upper middle-class tend to be most leveled and stable. Not sure if that rings true however.

That's interesting, R22. I can't tolerate alcohol because it takes very little to make me woozy, but I had a hot romance with codeine for a while.

r19 did you change your last name?

R4/R21 for the win! I come from neither.... I descend from Matzo ball soup!

Definitely peasants. My parents were the first in our family to even graduate high school, and my siblings were the first to achieve university degrees.

Peasants on both sides. My family didn't arrive in the USA until about 1904.

I’m Native American and Norwegian and related to Chief Joseph.

I'm supposedly related to Winston Churchill somehow, yet my mother's family is a rabble of the dirt poor to upper working class variety. My maternal relatives seem to settle in the extremes of uptight churchgoers or gas station robbers- not many in between. Two of my nephews are doing hard time. The religious ones act like they shit roses and would be mortified to know that I consider them all peasantry.

My dad comes from shitkickers on both sides but the more recent generations have done decently, for the most part. So, also peasants, but nobody pretends otherwise, unlike my mother's family.

My grandparents were dirt poor, literally. I think they imported dirt for them.

I am a direct descendant of a couple Kings, “but nobody likes to talk about that. That’s okay.” -DJT.

Actually, I’ve written about my regal ancestry before, so ho-hum.

My father’s family came from England (early 20th century).. They were wretchedly poor. My dad is very bright, and he was a hottie. He got a college education .. He married into an extremely wealthy Texas oil family. So.. in one generation, my surname went from peasant to upper class.

I doubt that social class can alter genetics, R22. How long has there even been a middle class ("upper" or otherwise)?

Both, but mostly lower and working classes. The rich kept better records though and one particular line I've discovered goes back many centuries.

My Dad's family worked in the coal and salt mines in Appalachia in the 19th and 20th centuries. My paternal grandfather dropped out of school at age 10 to support his family when his own father died at age 38 of black lung. But if you go back far enough in my Dad's family there are all sorts of discoveries. I I've found 3 direct ancestors who were Revolutionary War soldiers. One other line includes Goody Nurse who was hanged as a witch in Salem. One of my 6th great grandmothers came from a well-to-do English family that has a well-researched lineage with earls, counts and other assorted royals scattered across Europe. According to those records, one of my 40th great grandfathers was Charlemagne. My guess is the rest of my millions of 40th great grandparents were lower than the muck in Charlemagne's stables.

My mother's family came to the US in the 1840s- 1880s and were laborers here in the US (masons, bricklayers, railroad workers, tavern owners). Most came from farming roots in Europe.

I am aghast at all the peasants on here....

My mother's people were Scots-English who were herded on boats in the mid-late 17th century and sent off to the colonies just so Britain could be rid of them. They became the original American White Trash.

I'm related to the Stuarts, true heirs to the throne!

My father's family were among the Principalía of Pampanga. But they lost power and prestige when the Americans took over and imported their republican ideas.

The upper classes definitely kept better records. I can trace roots back to the 11th century, thanks to those records.

English peasantry dad's side. Mom's side half English aristocracy, half Scottish peasantry.

My father's father was a GOATHERD in Croatia. Iconic peasant.

Peasants, coal miners, and Iroquois

I have a friend from high school. From his mother's side of the family he was able to trace his ancestry back to Massachusetts 1639. He also told me one of his ancestors was burned at the stake as a WITCH in the Salem Witch Trials of 1698. I guess my high school friend descends from WITCH stock.

R42, but Salem witches were never burned at the stake. They were hanged.

I prefer to refer to my ancestors as settlers or pioneers, which almost all of my ancestors in the first generation in America were. All of my ancestral lines but one arrived in America is the 1600s or early 1700s. Of course that makes me look down on anyone whose family came to America after the Revolution, stealing my ancestors' jobs.

[quote]I have a friend from high school.

Just the one, dear?

I am a Duke related to a King.

Peasant from my dad’s side and ruling class from my mother’s.

OP , Honey , you even type PEASANT .

With lots of instances of wrong paternity, it's a little silly to claim being a direct descendant of 'so and so'.

I think the DNA ancestry testing is the best we can go with - that a certain part of you comes from a certain part of the world.

Team Pheasant Stock!

r49 I agree totally. I had that done and it was well worth the price.

Fred Armonson who was a Dancer in Germany, he pretended to be Japanese but he was really Korean. Fred just like him. He had an affair with a German girl and they had Fred's Dad, I guess. It was fascinating. There is a museum in Japan dedicated to the grandfather. Kind of fasinating

Poles, Russians and most Eastern Europeans have large feet, I am Irish and my feet are small...I thought it might mean something.

I'm aristocracy. My 4 or 5 x great grandfather was LQC Lamar ( Supreme Court Justice, Senator from Mississippi, Secretary of the Interior, Ambassador to England and Dean of Ole Miss law school) My 5 or 6 x great uncle was Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar( second president of The Republic of Texas, after Sam Houston) Most of the land and money have disappeared. All that's left are a few counties , streets, towns and a university in Beaumont named for my ancestors in commemoration. My friends know about my background and they are as underwhelmed with it as I am with their peasantry. Its actually never really afforded me a single advantage. However, LQC Lamar is profiled in JFK's Pulitzer Prize novel, Profiles in Courage. So, I got that going for me.

My great grandmother was a servant on my great grandfather's familys' estate. They had to move to America in order to get married....

OP... "come from?"

If you only go back as far as your 4th great grandparents, at this moment you would be dealing with 128 different people born in or around the mid 1700's.

Of course, go just one more generation back and there are 256 different grandparents.

Most of us have undoubtedly 'come from' a lot of places, geographically and socially.

If you were to cut me open you’d find the words ‘WORKING CLASS’ embedded right through me like a stick of rock. x

Peasants but sometimes I gild the Lilly because Americans love my posh accent and are too stupid to know better!

Literati, here

I'm a peasant on both sides. Fathers family were Irish peasants, mother's family were British peasants. My husband can trace his family line back to 1180 in Britain with a few titles along the way. Sadly all the money disappeared a couple of hundred years ago. So we're both peasants now.

Obviously if you have to ask... you're a peasant.

I come from mighty goat herding, sheep tending, Northern Kurdish mountain stock on my father's side. My mother's side were Jew's from Spain and Germany. More educated than my fathers side for sure. I took one of those DNA tests and it came back I have 20% Mongolian ancestry. Thanks Mongol hoards.

Peasant here - Ostfriesland farm laborers and Jewish German farm laborers from Baden-Wurttemburg. Not a scrap of artistocracy anywhere in the family tree.

kinda. my grandfather on my dad's side was cockney trash. a boxer from the slums of London who emigrated to NYC. My grandmother on that side was a poor seamstress from outside of Dublin, though she pulled herself out of utter poverty because she was a brilliant illustrator. A lot big NYC designers in the 30s and 40s used her to sketch out their designs and then she worked for Conde Nast, too. No one knew she was functionally illiterate.

In the mystical land of Dataloungia, Erna is a royal and the fruit of her loins will rule in succession.

we’re descended from simple tenant farmer folk in Norway, they lived on a gorgeous fjord, they moved to America in 1899to have a better life. In fact, they wound up in a railroad flat on the top floor of a 6th story walk-up in Bay Ridge (formerly ‘Little Norway’) Brooklyn and lived out their days there in relative misery from drinking and under-employment.

Irish horse thieves.

The majority of Americans come from poverty. That’s the reason why families left their homelands.

Family research is a hobby of mine. Seems that both sides of the family have been here before the 1800s with many of them arriving in the 1600s in New England. No one came through Ellis Island. For the most part they owned farms and acquired land, again both sides, through the years. From what I can tell they seemed to have come from good families in England and perhaps were looking for new opportunities in the colonies.

Quite a gap between "peasant stock" and aristocracy. Guess we're somewhere in vast middle class of early settlers.

It’s better to come from peasant stock. Aristos fucked their own families. That’s why most are so stupid or eccentric as they call it.

All of my direct ancestors were in the Colonies before the American Revolution. One ancestor came to Jamestown in 1615. Another arrived to the Plymouth Colony shortly after the original Mayflower settlers. They lived from Boston down to the Carolinas. Some fought for the Revolution and some were Loyalists. When the Civil War came, some fought for the Union and others for the Confederacy. Some slaughtered the native populations. Others owned slaves. Others were doctors and nurses and religious leaders. They encompass most of US history.

Whatever they were, it's clear I come from a long line of rebellious bastards.

Landowning aristocrat types on my mother’s side, upper upper middle on my dad’s.

Yet I am poor and grubby.

R17, that’s pretty interesting. R22, I can believe it. My whole family have addiction problems.

I'm supposed to be related to the "Red Onion King" of Germany. I doubt there is a "Red Onion King" of Germany.

[quote] Frankly I think most white Americans are, their ancestors were the ones who wanted to get the hell away from wherever they were born, the aristocrats and anyone else who had a decent quality of life stayed put.

This.

With very very few exceptions, anyone who emigrated to the US came here for a reason, so that even if there were earls and barons a few generations back, the actual people who crossed the ocean were dirt poor or fleeing the police or conscription or a revolution had wiped out the family fortune.

Yes some were educated, but being a minister or schoolteacher in Scotland in the 1820s just meant you were more educated than your peers--it didn't really pay very well.

All of those mid-century WASPs who DLers so love to worship are descended from people who made their fortunes in America, often in the Gilded Era. Before that they were just random white people holding it together.

My tragic stock are poor fishermen from Iceland who were ravaged by pirates and famine during the 1600s and 1700s, which forced them to flee to Denmark where they acquired work mostly as farmers, cobblers, and again as fishermen. The women stayed home with the children. They were "othered" in Denmark, never fully accepted by the Danish, and they suffered quite a lot of discrimination based on their immigrant status and poorer class. As many as could leave Denmark for North America did so in small numbers and got small farms upon their arrival. Most of the women were seamstresses. My grandfather committed suicide after the US federal government claimed eminent domain to take his farmland and build two highways on it; he had no idea what else he could possibly do after that because he felt he'd failed his family; farming was all he ever knew and had.

My family was flat broke when I was a kid, on welfare as my mother was divorced with three kids and no child support from our drug-addict father who eventually went to prison for grand larceny. As a kid, I was fortunate to find steady work as a landscaper/gardener, snow shoveler and child-sitter which enabled me at age 11 to buy my first (and rather shoddy) wind instrument at a pawn shop for $60. To pay for music lessons, I did yard work and gardening every week for a local music teacher, a sweet lady who taught me for several years. I went into a career in classical music early (first job was in an opera orchestra in my teens), worked my ass off for seven days a week for 20 years, and was a self-made millionaire by my late 30s. I then invested much of it in collecting and selling art to establish long-term security for myself and my husband. I'm 46 now, I own an international, scholarship-based arts conservatory that I founded ten years ago, and sometimes wish I could have shared some of this with my ancestors and even more recent relatives who went through so much hell before me. I can't, but at least I succeeded in breaking that chain.

not peasant, but midwest farmer stock.

However my mom got smart. After her teenage shotgun marriage happened and I came into the world, she got divorced and married into the 3rd richest family in my 15000 population town. She traded her stunning looks for cash. Suddenly we were flying in private airplanes my grandfather piloted up to second homes on lakes in minnesta etc etc, going to expensive summer camps, country clubs, golf, etc etc. Mom was smart, and she had me officially adopted by her new husband. He couldnt have kids and so I ended up an only child. He was a pretty good dad but not a husband of merit.

13 years later my mom ran off with a med student 2 years older than me that was working a summer job at our country club. I of course was a legal son and my adopted dad and I maintained a great relationship as did i with the rest of his family. Mom married the med student and that lastd 4 years..

I got very rich 45 years later as a result thanks to inherited money from my stepdad. I shared it with my mom of course. And we lived happily ever after.

We are descended from the Middle Classes.

R77 your mother sounds delightful

I can trace my lineage directly back to Caligula!

this thread inspired me to look. allegedly the first documented american with my british surname settled in jamestown, va, and purchased a “tobacco wife,” essentially a comfort worker whose passage to the new world was paid in tobacco.

sounds about right.

Granny's side...some lady lived in an Irish castle. After digging found that it was the MacDonald's castle and...forgot the Irish clan's name...but they were cousins...7 kings? or something.

Oh yeah! The castle was even in GOT.

Irrelevant. I come from depression-era grandparents.

Discovering one’s ancestry

Papa was a rolling stone

Wherever he laid his hat was his home

And when he died, all he left us was alone

peasant underclass

Pure peasant stock, coal miners, domestics, laborers, and barkeeps.

My parents were not only the first college grads in their families, they were the first high school grads too!

Yes. Compared to R88 none of my family went to college. That includes my parents and 8 kids. I was the only one to get a college degree.

I'm half-peasant stock, half not. I traced my genealogy a couple years ago and also did the DNA test, and found that I was around 50% English and had a lineage of barons on my father's side—not royalty by any means, but not peasants. My family name is English, and I was able to work all the way back to the beginning of the name when the Normans came down in the time of William the Conquerer. It was fascinating. I also learned that my 12th-great-grandfather was educated at Cambridge. My maternal ancestry is less clear, though I think they were more peasants than my father's lineage. My great-grandmother (mother's mother's mother) was a Christian from Ukraine who married a Russian Jew; he was executed during the Holocaust in Odessa, and my great-grandmother managed to flee with all her children and make her way west, eventually leaving Europe for the U.S.—she lived in barns and worked on farms in exchange for milk and crackers to feed herself and her children. She was a working-class laborer, and I believe her parents were as well. My maternal grandfather (mother's father's mother) was pretty much the same, and came from a long line of Irish Catholic working-class.

Everyone who traces their geneology seems to magically find some minor royalty eight or nine generations back.

R91 that's because royalty loves to fuck peasants

Not only peasant, but true inbred Appalachian stock on my father's side. One of my ancestors was a Hatfield.....yes, THOSE Hatfields. According to 23andme, I share genetic relationships with Richard III on one side and Niall of the Nine Hostages on the other. A lot of ancestors names Counts, too, which could indicate some nobility at some time, or, more likely, uppity servants who took the name. Mostly peasants or farmers on both sides (Irish, English, and German) for many generations. Since we all have 1,048, 576 18th generation back grandparents, and 2 trillion if we count back 40 generations, it's not really long odds to assume that one or more of them were upper class or even royalty. (That's not 2 trillion UNIQUE 40th great grandparents, since most of our ancestors through history married their first or second or third cousins.....ICK).

I'm lower than peasant stock. About half my ancestors arrived in Australia in chains and the rest were potato famine refugees. I thank them for an immune system that could see me stroll through the black death and zombie apocalypse without so much as a sniffle.

My grandma was the daughter of the town drunk, who eked out a living as a tenet farmer before he started lounging on the sidewalk full time. He was sort of like Otis from the Andy Griffith show, except meaner. Grandma married into the local Gentry, who owned a fly fishing business. She was always bitter and defensive, as she felt slighted by my grandfathers family. They most likely did look down on her. She also started to drink heavily, and could be quite intolerable. However, she never passed out in the public sphere, only on the living room floor.

[quote] royalty loves to fuck peasants

Peasant men are usually hotter anyway. Sturdy and hard from labor, while royal men are a bit soft and effete.

hungarian peasants

Italian and Polish.

But we sure can cook !

smell R71

Define "peasant."

I'm from pheasant stock.

🎅 I come from present stock.

Most of my immediate ancestors (5-6 generations back) were definitely "peasants" as they were farmers. I suspect that further back than that most were farmers as well. I've seen some genealogy research that shows most family lines being in British Colonial America (New England, Virginia and North Carolina). One particular line leads back to a British earl in the 1600s, but I don't know how accurate that is.

r96 gets it.

R104 it was also a double entendre.

r105 je l’ait entendu!

R205 I believe you meant to type je l'ai entendu

Some of you may be related to royalty, some of you may even be royalty. Some may be dowager empress. I, however, am a GODDESS!!

And I believer you meant to type R106, R107 ;)

[quote] they wound up in a railroad flat on the top floor of a 6th story walk-up in Bay Ridge (formerly ‘Little Norway’) Brooklyn

But were they Catholic?

R109 no I meant r205. I'm psychic.

r107 your “entendre” is no longer funny. why don’t you go correct grammar in youtube comments.

Cock farmer 🚜.

Who would be the hottest sex? A horny hot laborer or some mid-level accountant working in a bank?

I’m related to Mary, Queen of Scots on my father’s side and the DuPont family on my mother’s side. So definitely aristocracy.

I suppose Anderson Cooper comes from pseudo aristocracy at least on the Vanderbilt side.

Peasants and low level landed gentry.

r16 my mother's maiden name is Ball. The Ball family is related to Mary Ball, George Washington's mother. I am both pheasant and aristocracy. My paternal grandmother's grandfather was a titled nobleman from Germany.

R112 seems like she has some sand in her vagina

Both my mother and father came from very middle class, eastern European backgrounds. Teacher, tailor, musicians, etc...

I always thought I was totally white trash on both sides. But thanks to all the online ancestry search sites I've learned a lot. For instance, my last name is the same as family who owned a great deal of land on the east coast. There are a lot of black people with the name, so I guess their ancestors took their master's last name after they left the plantations (DNA tests have revealed I have no African blood myself).

Also, on my mom's side there is a name that sounds English, but it's actually a bastardization of a Jewish surname.

I’ve got DNA on my father’s side that connects me to Louis XIV and on my mother’s side that connects me to the Boleyn family.

I’m not losing my head over it!

R122 hère.

Louis XVI, i mean.

r118 Welcome to DL, Lucie Arnaz.

I'd rather be descended from PHEASANTS than peasants.

Peasant and very hardy.

My father's people were shetl Jews, so not really peasants in the sense of the gentile Russians around them. Regarding my mother's, I don't know about the Germans but the Scots Irish certainly ranked above the native Irish. Whatever, they all did damn well for themselves and their children once they hit the USA.

We'uns is ALL royal.

At leastest thems of us who is at all English!

(The same actually goes for practically any European. Any African-American, too, who are descended in the same way from African chiefs and nobility

No matter how many "peasants" lost to time we all are descended from, simple statistics show that nearly everyone inevitably also is descended from key "greats" of history, such as Charlemagne and William the Conqueror or Tenkamenin or Mansa Musa.

Of my four grandparents, two were of solid middle class backgrounds going back many generations (merchants, academics, ranking military, landlords), the other two were of peasant stock going back many generations (blacksmiths, potato diggers, regular infantry, carriage drivers). One of each on either side.

I'm related to Peasant stock through marriage. As I understand it one of my great, g,g,g.... grand mothers married up, to a Peasant in the 13 hundreds, the rest of the family remained Serfs until we slithered away one moonless night to England and Ireland. Fortunately, it was during a period when the Irish were looking for big dicks and small brained stock to over come their ever shrinking wee wees throughout the country. The Brits had doused everything edible with salt peter for years. This resulted in what many referred to as the Irish Curse. In later years some snuck on boats to the Azores, US, South America and Haywhya as they called the Hawaiian Islands. Some became household help and drivers for "miss daisy" and few made it big time as brick layers private contractors and major land owners in the US and Brazil. Today we are all distinguishable by our waring of sandals year round so we can count higher than ten if and when that ever becomes necessary.

[quote] I am related on my Dad's side to Frances Folsom Cleveland,

That is not the aristocracy.

If being related to a First lady meant you were part of the aristocracy, then people related to Melania would be part of the aristocracy.

Both, it would appear. Probably some middle class as well. There's actually a British guy who did the King Edward VIII abdication thing and gave up his future inheritance and position in order to marry "the woman he loved." She wasn't divorced or anything, just German, and his father wouldn't have it. The young couple married and moved to America where he started breeding horses out in the prairies of South Dakota. Most of the other relatives on the Czech and Austrian sides seemed to have come over during some kind of economic and/or religious upheaval after war and border changes. I imagine they could have been refugees of some sort. My grandmother told the story of how her grandfather refused to go along with what went down Vatican 1 and the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. I guess my Cartholic relatives were always of the rebellious sort .. lol!

I come from Pleasant Stock.

I am The Pleasant Peasant!

I’m a direct descendant of a 4th century Roman consul; Charlemagne; and Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

However, in the last 400 years, mostly peasants. I have 3 sets of grandparents who were dirt poor.

i think some enormous percentage of the North American and European population today are direct descendants of Charlemagne.

R136, but not everyone knows it!

Just for fun-- Indians call the hillbillies of India "village people."

Middleclass Irish and middleclass German. Nothing fancy, but professionals and tradesmen.