Three of my four grandparents were immigrants to the US, and the fourth was born shortly after his parents got off the boat, so my ethnic origins are simple and easily determined: 3/4 Irish, 1/4 German-Alsatian.

Folks whose antecedents have been in America for longer typically have much more complicated family trees with much more mixing of known and unknown nationalities. I imagine it's much the same in Australia.

My paternal grandparents grew up in the west of Ireland, County Mayo, and didn't leave until after they were married. I never knew either one of them; my dad's mother died when he was young (8 years old), and his father passed away the year I was born.

My maternal grandfather was an American-born Irish Catholic whose parents were recent immigrants. I remember him fairly well from my early childhood; he died when I was about 5 or 6. He was very adamant about assimilating, being an American; he never wanted to hear or speak about Ireland. We knew a number of relatives from his mother's side of his family, but never had any contact with any part of his father's family. I have since learned that his surname, McCartney, is considered by some to be a "Protestant name," which, if true, might explain his disconnection from one side of his family and his reluctance to involve himself with Ireland and her "Troubles." That is, in other words, that I suspect that his parents were a "mixed marriage," with his mother a Catholic and his father from a Protestant family ~ perhaps a convert to Catholicism, but perhaps not (which might explain his "invisibility" and some of his son's attitudes).

McCartney, by the way, used to be an unusual name in our corner of the US, and members of our family constantly had to correct people: "No, it's not McCarthy; it's McCart-NEEE!" That all changed, of course, with the advent of the Beatles.

(Squealing young girls used to call Grandma after looking her up in the phone book, asking "Mrs. McCartney, is Paul there?" Thinking they were talking about my younger brother Paul, she'd answer, "Not right now, but he'll be here for lunch tomorrow." Because her house was a block from our school, all us siblings and cousins came by for lunch every day. She never understood the callers' reaction!)

So we've finally gotten to my maternal grandma, the one grandparent I knew and loved for the whole time I was growing up. She and her parents came to America from Alsace-Lorraine, a province in northeastern France that has historically changed hands back and forth between France and Germany with each war. (Both Grandma and her mother, my "Granny," lived into their 90s, by the way; I'm hoping to inherit their longevity.) My Alsatian family was/is definitely German, not French, by language and ethnicity. Perhaps we'd all have referred to the family as "German" rather than "Alsatian" had it not been for two world wars ~ but there were those wars, and Germany was the enemy both times, so our German ethnicity may have been subtly de-emphasized.

In any event, while I identify myself as Irish-American and have a serious interest in and love of Ireland, the one grandparent that I knew best while growing up was the only one of the four who was not Irish.