The following exceprt is from an article posted in the March 11, 2012 edition of indystar.com:
NEW YORK – The United States, first populated by Native Americans, rediscovered by Europeans and colonized under the flags of the Spanish, English and French, is now filled with Germans.
More than half of the nation’s 3,143 counties contain a plurality of people who describe themselves as German-American, according to a Bloomberg compilation of data from the Census Bureau’s 2010 American Community Survey. The number of German-Americans rose by 6 million during the past decade to 49.8 million, almost as much as the nation’s 50.5 million Hispanics.
“A lot of people aren’t aware that German is the largest ancestral group in the country,” said Don Heinrich Tolzmann, the author of “The German-American Experience.”
