Half northern half southern Europeans

[osservatore]

buddy said:

^Exactly, and even the ones darker in pigmentation are quite rare. Most Sicilians really are not that dark. Al Pacino is the archetype of the Sicilian, and it's not uncommon to see Sicilians with lighter hair/eyes, I don't mean Scandinavian-looking obviously, but people who would look similar to Frenchmen or northern Italians. The average Sicilian looks more Greek than anything (because there's much ancient Greek ancestry in Sicily). This nonsense has to stop.

Al Pacino- but De Niro as well- looks as archetypical italian tout-court.
It's not the Sicily has that much difference with the rest of Italy, even northenr Italy.
Even the most "nordicist" of northenr italian posters here had to say that, speaking of physical variations in Italy, we speak about average.

(in some villages of Sicily, the elders speak northern italian dialects! actually, there was a trend in the Middle Age for northern italian to settle there)

In Sicily, what is not uncommon is to see nordic looking guys, that popular belief, exaggerating an historical fact, tribute to the Norman rule of the island;
as well as very meditarreanean looking people, the majority.

(three thirds of my neighbors here are from Sicily or nearby Calabria, so...)

[osservatore]

Also, correcting one of my above posts, it's not that the guy in the photo looks "darker" than sicilian.
Many of my friends get darker than him thanks to tanning in Summertime.

It's that he looks somehow "blacker" or more negroid than the average italian.
My brother, who shares his lips and nose, has actually less frizzy hair and a very lighter skin.
While this guy, all considering, resembles somehow a "mulatto".

I'm not saying he can't be sicilian.
He doesn't look like the average one, for sure.

PS
But the man posted as his father seems very typical!

[Kalashnikov]

Where do you think this people come from??

persons with a white dot above are brothers & sisters.

[osservatore]

Man, my mother has tons of photograph like that.

They look like italians of the Seventies!

(just wait me to have a new scanner- I left the old pc for a macintosh and I'm an happy man now- and you'll see! ;D)

[Kalashnikov]

osservatore said:

Man, my mother has tons of photograph like that.

They look like italians of the Seventies!

(just wait me to have a new scanner- I left the old pc for a macintosh and I'm an happy man now- and you'll see! ;D)

Hehe, even the decade was right, but that s unfair I didnt ask italians from Italy, lol, yes these are all 100% sicilians, my father and his brothers and sisters + my mom.

No irish, german or eskimo mix, that s one of the reasons why I would call this thread something like " 1 blond and 1 brunette parent.....

[buddy]

penetratorx said:

I thought Robert De Niro was half Italian and Half Jewish. I'm always sceptical of Americans claiming to be Irish, a trend seems to have developed in the USA towards claims of Irishness, I have noticed a similar phenomenon in Thailand where it is popular to claim Chinese descent and in the Philippines where they like to claim Spanish blood. I also have read that when Rome was at it's height it was popular among the noble Romans to be descended from the Etruscans.

I'm pretty sure DeNiro's mostly Irish. What you said about Americans claiming Irish ancestry is partially true. Many Americans think they're Irish when they're really maybe 1/4 or an 1/8 Irish. It's also not uncommon to hear of Americans with Scottish surnames claiming to be Irish. Sometimes you have the same phenomenon with people claiming to be Native American, with Cherokee being the most popular answer.

[osservatore]

I never understood why "Cherokee" pops up so frequently as an ancestry for american actors...
were these Cherokee so popular, over other NAs, or what?

[Kalashnikov]

I think it s a fashion thing, I even doubt americans could distinguish the various indian tribes. ;D

[buddy]

The Cherokees are a popular choice probably because they are the most famous, as they were a numerous tribe in the southern U.S. who were forcibly moved west by the government to reservation lands in what is now Oklahoma. They suffered much hardship on their journey so I guess some white Americans (especially in the South) think it's cool or honorable to be part Cherokee as opposed to having an ancestor who fought for the Confederacy ;D.

[penetratorx]

buddy said:

I'm pretty sure DeNiro's mostly Irish. What you said about Americans claiming Irish ancestry is partially true. Many Americans think they're Irish when they're really maybe 1/4 or an 1/8 Irish. It's also not uncommon to hear of Americans with Scottish surnames claiming to be Irish. Sometimes you have the same phenomenon with people claiming to be Native American, with Cherokee being the most popular answer.

I have encountered numerous Americans claiming to be Irish who had English surnames, sure some immigrants to the USA may have changed their names but I doubt the number is huge especially among Irish, the period of the largest Irish migration was the 19th century which was also the time of highest anti English sentiment in the USA so quite why they would choose to take the names of the enemy I dont know. there is only 3 non English/Scottish/Welsh surnames in the top 20 surnames of the USA and they are all Spanish.

What a lot of these so called Irish Americans may not be aware of is that from the 12th up to the 18th century there was massive migration from Great Britain into Ireland and so even if their forefathers did come from Ireland they may well have been descendent's of these settlers and so not really Irish.

I had a run in with 1 wannabe Irish American in a chatroom once who abused me for being English and said I was the enemy of his people, the username he used sounded like a real name with the surname 'Mansfield' I asked if that was his surname and he said yes, I then asked if his family had changed names and he said no, when I told him his surname was 100% English and is not only the name of a town in England but also of a park 5 mins from my home he got rather irate, I then asked if he was a Catholic and he said he was a Protestant, he was rather lost for words when I told him that Irish Protestants are overwhelmingly pro English and usually of English or Scottish descent.

Still at least he learned something from the experience - hopefully !

[buddy]

^Good points. That's definitely a touchy subject there as many Irishmen are not so content about having an Englishman among his ancestors. The people of Ulster are clearly of mainly Scottish/English descent as you stated and their descendants here in America are known as the Scotch-Irish. Scotch-Irish immigrants came way before the Catholic Irish who immigrated during the mid-19th century and onwards with the potato famine. People of Scotch-Irish ancestry are heavily concentrated in the South, especially in the region known as Appalachia.

[Hairless]

osservatore said:

I never understood why "Cherokee" pops up so frequently as an ancestry for american actors...
were these Cherokee so popular, over other NAs, or what?

The Cherokee (Tsalagi) were considered one of the "civilized" tribes. They were removed by force from the East, and this became widely a popular theme in music of the 1970s, just as the Native American movement was gaining a lot of support. So most people have heard of the Cherokee and a lot of people who are part NA or think they are imagine that they are Cherokee. A lot of that came from the revival movements in the 1970s and the popular images of Cherokee at that time. Also, Cherokee have what I believe is the only written NA language. You are right in that there were many, many NA groups in the Eastern U.S. during colonial times and, sadly, most no longer exist today. Someone whose ancestors are from the Appalachian regions -- Virginia, North Carolina, or Kentucky (parts of those states) during a certain time period could be Cherokee, Manahoc, Monacan, Choctaw, Shawnee, Powhatan, Saponi to name a _few_ (not to mention many subtribes and intermarriages between times). NA genealogists often lament that virtually anyone researching NA blood thinks they are Cherokee, even when they clearly are from a region or group that is not.

My husband has Cherokee blood from when the Quakers of North Carolina and Virigina protected the Cherokee and there were intermarriages. He may also have blood from other groups that we don't know about. We have been researching that, but it is difficult to know who was what race, as many records reflect "Christian" names and even those that list race often call NA "white". The official records used to determine NA ancestry were mostly taken in the mod-late 1800s and early 1900s after various NA groups were being herded west to reservation lands.

[Drooperdoo]

My kids are half-Northern, half-Southern. It's weird: The girl has my features but my wife's fairer complexion, whereas my son is the spitting-image of his Austrian mom but with my olive skin.

Here's my seven-month-old son, Max:



And here's his sister, Astrid (at around the same age):



Of course, the lighting differences exaggerate the contrast in complexions. (Max's picture was taken at night in poor lighting and Astrid's picture was taken in a full flood of morning sunlight.) So, in reality, Max is not nearly as dark as he appears in the first picture--even though he's still clearly olive-skinned.

Since his photos are identical to his mom's at the same age, it's my greatest ambition that he end up as a good mixture of North and South--like, say, Tyrone Power . . . with Northern features, but with black hair and an olive complexion:

[buddy]

Nice-looking kids Droop. Yes I think that there's really no way to tell how the children of such combinations will come out. I think much of it just has to do with the fact that northern and southern Europeans are both, well, Europeans lol. Thus, they both share many of the same genes coding for traits that represent the entire European Caucasoid spectrum, only the darker traits crop up more in southerners whilst the northerners have fairer features. The same goes for facial features.

In my case I came out as the spitting image of my Sicilian father, except with my Northern mother's greenish eyes, and back to what I've been saying about overlap between Northerners and Southerners, some of my paternal relatives are light-eyed whereas some of my maternal relatives are hazel/brown-eyed heh.

[Educate Me]

Jamiroquai is half portuguese, half english







I think he looks quite med