Well...I've learned that nothing I was told about our family history is likely true.
I'll first say that I was definitely raised in a family who believed "You're American. That's what's important." We have no culturally-based family traditions or anything like that. However, when we had to do family heritage projects in school my mom said that her family was German and my dad said his was French. For family tree projects we never got farther than great-grandparents and even then it was "I don't know. Her first name was Myrtle or Margaret or something like that. I just called her Grandma ___."
When my son (now 20) was in elementary school, he had to do a family heritage project and my parents told him the same thing "German for grandma's side. French for grandpa's side." The school had an ancestry account and brought home a print out home which showed that a LOT more people with my dad's last name immigrated from Ireland than France. Weird, I thought... but there were a few from France, so one of those must be us.
Then, my mom took a DNA test. It originally said that a large part of her heritage was "Northwest Europe" which my mother insisted was the German part. However, it's been revised over the years and now it's almost all England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and a little bit of the Nordic region. Nothing German at all.
Early in Covid 19, I started looking into the family history just for something to do. I lost interest after a while (and/or met dead ends to what I could research for free online). However, on my mom's side, I have traced several relatives back to their immigration to the US and they're all from England or Ireland (none from Germany). And on my dad's side I found out that my grandmother was 100% Irish (American born, but from Irish immigrants). I do not remember her well -- she died when I was 4 -- but several of her siblings lived till I was a teen and I remember them well. I don't remember any of them EVER saying anything about being Irish.
I mentioned my findings to my Dad and he was like "oh yeah, I know..." and I said "I think your grandmother's maiden name was Bunke, but the handwriting on the record wasn't great." And he said, "No... it was Burke" and spouted off a bunch of other info about people and towns were people were buried, etc. How did I not have this info before now?! I *know* I asked. My mother was shocked too and even said "Then why did you tell the kids your family was French?!" and he said "I don't think I did." But he definitely did... all though school and also for my son's project.