Your ethnic composition?

[Verily]

50% English (Smith, Gough, Bacon, Mason) [I think Gough might be Welsh, actually, not sure.]
25% Scottish (Abercrombie, Roberts)
12.5% Irish of dubious origin (Byrne)
12.5% Swedish (Feldt)

This is my great-grandparents.

The Irish is of dubious origin because, while the family name on that line is the very Irish Byrne, my great-great-great-grandfather Peter Byrne appears to have been an orphan and was possibly adopted into/fostered by a family with surname Byrne rather than born to it. Peter Byrne also pretended to be the illegitimate grandson of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Salmon Portland Chase but probably was not.

This is further complicated by the fact that he abandoned his wife (Bridget Heaton, so that's a bit more English) without divorcing her and fled New York City to marry another woman in Alabama. Bridget Heaton stopped using her married name and pretended to be a widow, so we have no records from her as to almost anything about Peter Byrne's life. Also, Byrne would be a very Catholic Irish name, but that line of the family is Protestant as far back as can be traced--which would be very, very odd for a name associated strongly with Catholic Ireland.

[Verily]

Verily, that's fascinating... whenabouts did they live?  I could try to find census records for you, if it's 1850-1930 (though 1890's were burnt to a crisp).

Trust me, the family has tried. There are some very dedicated genealogists in parts of the Byrne line who have tried, but they all say things dead end with Peter Byrne and Bridget Heaton. (The rest can be traced at least to colonial America except the Feldts, who immigrated from Sweden in  the 1890s.) As I recall, Peter Byrne and Bridget Heaton would have been in the 1860s or so, with Peter Byrne abandoning her around 1870. And actually he must have been my great-great-great-grandfather, thinking about the dates. I get it all confused.

We do know that Bridget Heaton claimed to be a widow on her census forms even though Peter Byrne was definitely alive and well and filling out census forms in Alabama. The trouble is with finding out anything about their families; even if they weren't either of them orphans, both clearly came from very impoverished New York City families. But neither mentions parents on their census forms.

[Verily]

Verily, have you had any chance to look through Irish church records? My wife says that once you get them traced back to Ireland that's all you can use.

Ah, but it's the getting to Ireland that's the trouble. And there are too many fecking Byrnes and O'Byrnes and various alternative spellings in Ireland to be making guesses about Peter Byrne's parents or grandparents. (Like I said, we're not even sure they were Irish.)

[Verily]

Verily, have you had any chance to look through Irish church records? My wife says that once you get them traced back to Ireland that's all you can use.

Ah, but it's the getting to Ireland that's the trouble. And there are too many fecking Byrnes and O'Byrnes and various alternative spellings in Ireland to be making guesses about Peter Byrne's parents or grandparents. (Like I said, we're not even sure they were Irish.)

Yeah, I dunno. I'm sure my wife will read my posts here and have a better response. She's the genealogy master of the family.

There's all sorts of other interesting stuff going on in the family, too. George Washington is my cousin some dozen times removed, as I'm descended from his aunt (which is as close as you can get, I think; every line closer has died out). That goes Ball (his mother was Mary Ball Washington, her sister was Sarah Ball Haynie) -> Haynie -> Blackburn -> Mason -> Byrne -> Abercrombie (my own surname). My great-grandmother Evelyn Gough was the first woman to get her PhD from Columbia University. I think that's it for interesting family trivia.

We're probably related to the Abercrombies of Abercrombie and Fitch, too. David Abercrombie's parents moved from Alabama to Baltimore after the Civil War, and our Abercombie line were definitely plantation owners in Alabama. But that's not confirmed, and it's not really something to be proud of, anyway. Although I think someone way back on that line was Governor-General of the Colony of South Carolina, too.

[Verily]

Verily, that's fascinating... whenabouts did they live?  I could try to find census records for you, if it's 1850-1930 (though 1890's were burnt to a crisp).

Trust me, the family has tried. There are some very dedicated genealogists in parts of the Byrne line who have tried, but they all say things dead end with Peter Byrne and Bridget Heaton. (The rest can be traced at least to colonial America except the Feldts, who immigrated from Sweden in  the 1890s.) As I recall, Peter Byrne and Bridget Heaton would have been in the 1860s or so, with Peter Byrne abandoning her around 1870. And actually he must have been my great-great-great-grandfather, thinking about the dates. I get it all confused.

We do know that Bridget Heaton claimed to be a widow on her census forms even though Peter Byrne was definitely alive and well and filling out census forms in Alabama. The trouble is with finding out anything about their families; even if they weren't either of them orphans, both clearly came from very impoverished New York City families. But neither mentions parents on their census forms.

I see a Peter C. Byrne (b. c. 1810) in Baldwin, Alabama in 1850, 1860, and 1870, and a Bridget Heaton (b. c. 1839) in New York City in 1860, but I'm too lazy to check alternate spellings and such

Incidentally, it's impossible that they mentioned marital status but not place of birth of parents on census forms; marital status is only asked from 1880 on, which is when parental birth is introduced.  I suppose the only exception would be if the parents' location of birth were specifically listed as "Unknown" or "United States of America", which is possible.  It's also true that there are lots of mistakes in those two columns, including my great-great-grandmother who answered different states every time she was asked until finally she just ended up saying "United States of America" (even more amusing is that I tracked down her parents and determined that not only did she answer different states each time she never even said the correct ones!)

If you actually wanted to look more into this, I'll ask my second cousin Darcy for more details. She's the one who knows all of this stuff in depth and does all the research.