The U.S. Census Bureau says there are plenty of Germans in the Pittsburgh region. There's also more than a few Irish and enough Italians to man their own army - even if it does belong to Franco Harris.
There also are very few Swedes here - which Aileen Anderson of Mt. Lebanon believes may have something to do with Sweden being such a great place to live.
"When my dad came, he wanted to turn right around and go back," said Anderson, 69, a member of the Scandinavian Society of Western Pennsylvania who comes from a long line of Swedes.
A Census 2000 Supplementary Survey estimating the ancestry of people in the Pittsburgh metro area indicates about 29 percent of the population in the six-county metropolitan statistical area is from German descent - more than 667,000 people. That's followed by the Irish at 18 percent with more than 415,000. Some people may have answered for multiple nationalities.
The Census bureau asked 700,000 households nationwide about what region of the world with which they associate themselves. The survey basically counts the ancestry of the region's white population, since the black, Hispanic and Asian populations are categorized under race, rather than ancestry.
Edward Muller, a University of Pittsburgh History professor who specializes in the region's history, said the figures don't tell the whole Pittsburgh story.
While there's undoubtedly a high number of Germans and Irish, the region is associated more with eastern European nations of Slavic background, Muller said. The U.S. Census survey, though, counts nations such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Ukraine individually.
"You're better off to lump these together the way the American public did when they were coming over here," Muller said.
Muller said the region was predominantly Irish and German through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "After 1880 ... the Irish and German immigration begins to slow down and the upper curve (of immigration) is in the southern and eastern European nations," Muller said.
Compared to the highly Germanic Cincinnati and New England cities with Irish bloodlines, Pittsburgh rests in the middle, Muller said. "When it comes to the second (immigration) wave of the late 19th and early 20th century, we come out as being disproportionately heavy in the east European communities."
Still, the region "has a viable Germanic community," said Erik Wittman, president of the local chapter of the German American National Congress.
The congress - which also goes by the Germanic acronym DANK - is the largest organization of Americans of German descent. The Pittsburgh chapter has about 300 members, but Wittman said there's about eight existing German social clubs whose numbers are greater.
"In the Pittsburgh area, many of the ethnic organizations are old ethnic, from a standpoint of folks whose ancestry really goes back 100 or 200 years," he said. "(Germans) move someplace and stay there."
As for the Swedes, the U.S. Census survey estimates there's only 1 percent of them here. Some of them - Pittsburgh Penguins goaltenders, for example - stand out more than others, Anderson said.
"We also have the Hedburg, you know."
