Whats Joel Furrs ethnic and socioeconomic background?
Joel is, to be blunt, highly educated white trash — the scion of generations of poor crackers in rural North Carolina and Florida. He does not come from any clear-cut European ancestral background — he’s your basic American mongrel, not precisely what you’d call Anglo-Saxon and not precisely derived from the British Isles. At least one great-grandmother was still speaking Dutch most of her life and he does have a blood trait which is predominantly found in peoples of Mediterranean descent. His family, on both sides, has been resident in the rural South for so many years that the country of origin of any branch of the family is mostly guesswork. His earliest known ancestor, one Henry Furr (or, perhaps, Heinrich Furrer), is recorded as having arrived in the Carolinas in 1742, having come from Zurich in Switzerland. However, there are currently no Furrs listed in the Swiss telephone directory so it’s anyone’s guess as to whether Henry Furr was actually Swiss or whether he had just trave
