I’m at home in a town about 10-15 miles from the town and hospital I was born in (as the crow flies.)

And I’ve lived the majority of my life in a town that’s probably about another 3 miles from there.

If I were asked to name my home town, I wouldn’t give the name of the town with the hospital, I’d give the town I grew up in.

But it’s all close enough together that all three towns share a certain sense of hominess for me, I have childhood memories from all 3 towns.

We all speak, more-or-less, the same local dialect with the same slang (there’s a couple shibboleths and bits of local lore that are unique to one part of the county over another) We enjoy the same local foods, root for the same sports teams, attend a lot of the same big local events, etc.

I proudly, and without a hint of irony, tell people that my ancestry is from that town I grew up in.

Yes, if you go back 3+ generations, you’ll find that all of my ancestors came from various European countries. Little bits of that has trickled down to the current generation, like a certain fondness for pierogi and kielbasa from my Polish side.

But that’s also part of my local culture, those are fairly common food items here too.

I don’t speak any of the languages my ancestors spoke, I’ve never set foot in those countries. Even my family name hasn’t really carried over, my great great grandfather changed the name after having already lived here for some time under the original Italian name. It’s a pretty unusual anglicization that barely resembles the original name, and anywhere in the world you may happen to encounter someone with my name, you know they can trace their heritage back to my home town.

And if you try to go much further back from that, the trail kind of goes cold. You can kind of make some educated guesses at which regions in their various old countries the different branches of my family came from, but not much more than that, except on the aforementioned polish side, some of those ancestors were a little more recent immigrants (though still well-before my time) and we have some communication with some relatives in Poland. Nothing regular, but once in a while someone on either side reaches out to see how things are going, and we know enough that if we really wanted to we could probably track each other down if we ever ended up in each other’s countries.

But overall, my family history pretty much begins with my great-great(or so) grandparents arriving in America and settling in my hometown.