Curt Mills #2: Where are you from? No, where are from? What nationality are you?

My nationality and heritage are rather interesting, and in the oldest of conventional senses, pretty standard.  The term White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) is as abused these days as a loaded racial and cultural term.  Most people called WASPs or deemed “Waspy” are probably not ones, or full ones, and are probably only called that more out of a pejorative sense, or that they seem to embody qualities stereotypically seen as WASPy.

However, from everything I can glean about my heritage, I think I am actually a full-blooded, one hundred percent White Anglo Saxon Protestant, at least in the genealogical sense (not in the stereotypical financial sense.  I am hardly poor, and extremely wealthy in the macro, global sense, but my family hardly summers in Rangoon.)  So, at the risk of being recruited in to Voldemort’s pure blood army a la a Harry Potter, the two sides of my family – Mills and Schoenwetter have the following genesis. 

Mills is all English, Scottish, and Scotts-Irish.  Scotts-Irish being a very unique genealogical characteristic, and of particular pride to my family, particularly my father.  According to Wiki, “Scotch-Irish (or Scots-Irish) Americans are the descendants of Presbyterian and other Protestant dissenters from the Irish province of Ulster who migrated to North America during the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of the Scotch-Irish were descended from Scottish and English families who colonized Ireland during the Plantation of Ulster in the 17th century.”  Much of the Scotts-Irish settled American Appalachia, including my Mills family.  Schoenwetter (meaning “Pretty Weather” in German) side is German and English, making me 100 percent from the original Anglo and Saxon tribes, and Protestant.