In 1980, English ancestry was the largest group in the US at 50 million. By 2000 it had dropped to 32 million I think.
Even with massive 19th century German immigration, English would have had a massive head start (and something like 60% of whites in 1790 were of English descent I believe).
Has any genealogical statistician ever attempted to quantify the "right answer" on what %age of modern day Americans' ancestors from 400+ years ago lived in which country? Self-reporting seems highly problematic, and as noted in the other thread, there's the problem of people having many different ethnicities at once, but only reporting the top one or two (which they'll often get "wrong").
