German Americans
ethnic group; Americans of German birth or descent
German Americans (German: Deutschamerikaner, pronounced [ˈdɔʏtʃʔameʁɪˌkaːnɐ]; Low German: Düütschamerikaner) are Americans who have full or partial German ancestry.
According to the United States Census Bureau's figures from 2022, German Americans make up roughly 41 million people in the United States, which is approximately 12% of the population. This represents a decrease from a 2009 US Census Bureau table that reported 50.7 million Americans identified as having German roots. In the 2020 census, roughly two thirds of those who identify as German also identified as having another ancestry, while one third identified as German alone. German Americans account for about one third of the total population of people of German ancestry in the world. Around 190,000 permanent residents from Germany were living in the United States in 2025.
The first significant groups of German immigrants arrived in the British colonies in the 1670s, and they settled primarily in the colonial states of Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. The Mississippi Company of France later transported thousands of Germans from Europe to what was then the German Coast, Orleans Territory in present-day Louisiana between 1718 and 1750. Pennsylvania, with 3.5 million people of German ancestry, has the largest population of German-Americans in the U.S. and is home to one of the group's original settlements, the Germantown section of present-day Philadelphia, founded in 1683. German Americans were drawn to colonial-era British America by its abundant land and religious freedom, and were pushed out of Germany by shortages of land and religious or political oppression.
“German Americans” enters the record as ethnic group; Americans of German birth or descent. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what German, Americans and ethnic can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“German Americans” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, German, Americans and ethnic provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q141817. The Library of Congress control number is sh85054331. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2022, 2009, 2020 and 2025.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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- Expand the search: follow German Americans primary sources, German Americans archive and German research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “German Americans” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.