Originally Posted by DontRunMeOver

People tend to believe the family history they're told. For obvious reasons, it wasn't exactly trendy to admit to German heritage in many places for most of the 20th century and consequently many people wouldn't realise if they did have a lot of German ancestry.

At the same time, its very common for people to overstate their Irish roots (I don't know why this is, but just ask any Irish abroad... they always get people banging on to them about their Irish roots.)

On TV here they have a series called 'where do you come from' and Jeremy Irons was on it. He always claimed to everybody that he had a big Irish background (he thought he did) and when they tried to find evidence for it on the show they found actually his whole family was English... apart from one single relation, about three centuries previous, who some company blatantly just told him was Irish to get him to go away.