Western->European->Celtic->Scots-Irish->American->Okie->humanist->universalist

My people, the fathers and grandfathers who form the cultural lineage of my family, are of the American branch of those we call the Scots-Irish.  People from Lowland Scotland who settled the Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland at the invitation of a Protestant English king who wanted to supplant the Irish Catholics.  The Troubles began the day they arrived, and continue more or less to this day.  As I understand it, before they were Ulstermen, before they were Lowland Scots, they were the Celts who fought the Romans to a standstill in northern Britain and inspired Hadrian to build his wall.  They have been fighting somebody for as long as they have been an identifiable people.

A couple of English kings later, when the land deal in Northern Ireland had become a good deal more troublesome and a good deal less attractive, rumors of the promise of America attracted a substantial migration to the new colonies.  These transplanted Scots/Irish/Americans tended to settle not in the built up English enclaves along the coast, but to migrate to the western frontier of the colonies, where they were more than happy to fight the native peoples for land to settle on, and when necessary to fight the more Anglified gentry of the coasts whenever their independence was threatened.  When that first great wave of migration crested early in the eighteenth century, that frontier ran roughly along the Appalachian Mountains, where the Scots-Irish culture survives almost intact to this day.  As the American frontier pushed west these folks tended to move west with it.  They embody what we think of as the American pioneer spirit.  Some call it the American spirit of independence.  Up close it sometimes looks a lot more like pig-headed stubbornness.

I only learned most of this quite recently, from James Webb's book Born Fighting.  Until I read Webb's book, I had only the vaguest notions of where my family came from and how we got where we are.  Born Fighting was an enlightenment to me.  Lots of things about my family's story, which didn't make much sense to me before, now make perfect sense.  And some things about my country that didn't make all that much sense to me, now at least make some sense.  For good or ill, a deep stratum of that culture underlies much of what we think of as American culture.  To any European struggling to understand why Americans sometimes do such crazy shit, I highly recommmend Webb's book.  

Oh, and everything from Western to Okie is pretty much what I inherited.  The humanist and universalist bits I've acquired on my own.

We all bleed the same color.