Why is German the largest self-reported ancestry in the United States and not English if the US was a British colony?

Question

Why isn’t it English by far?

In: Other

Answer 1

Is American an ancestry option in this data? If so, I imagine that a large amount of self-identifying Americans are English. I am looking at [this map](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/stories/2023/10/white-population/figure-4-white-population.jpg) where American is not an option, and English seems have a larger number. On [this map](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Census-2000-Data-Top-US-Ancestries-by-County.svg) however with American as an option, you can see that that English ancestry is replaced with American. The later map probably experience more vote splitting between English and American, which results in Germany being the largest single group.