establishment of British settlements; as well as to non-English groups having emigrated in order to establish significant communities. Number of British Americans Table below shows the results from 1980 when ancestry was first collected by the U.S. census and the 2010 American Community Survey. Response rates for the ancestry question was 90.4% in 1990 and 80.1% in 2000 for the total U.S. population. Composition of Colonial America According to estimates by Thomas L. Purvis (1984), published in the European ancestry of the United States, gives the ethnic composition of the American colonies from 1700 to 1755. British ancestry in 1755 was estimated to be 52% English and Welsh, 7.0% Scots-Irish, and 4% Scottish. Studies on origins, 1790 The ancestry of the 3,929,214 population in 1790 has been estimated by various sources by sampling last names in the very first United States official census and assigning them a country of origin. There is debate over the accuracy between the studies with individual scholars and the Federal Government using different techniques and conclusion for the ethnic composition. A study published in 1909 titled A Century of Population Growth by the Census Bureau estimated the British origin combined were around 90% of the white population. Another source by Thomas L. Purvis in 1984 estimated that people of British ancestry made up about 62% of the total population or 74% of the white or European American population. Some 81% of the total United States population was of European heritage. Around 757,208 were of African descent with 697,624 being slaves. A Century of Population Growth (1909) American Council of Learned Societies (1929) The 1909 Century of Population Growth report came under intense scrutiny in the 1920s; its methodology was subject to criticism over fundamental flaws that cast doubt on the accuracy of its conclusions. The catalyst for controversy had been passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed numerical quotas on each country of Europe limiting the number of immigrants to be admitted out of a finite total annual pool. The size of each national quota was determined by the National Origins Formula, in part computed by estimating the origins of the colonial stock population descended from White Americans enumerated in the 1790 Census. The undercount of other colonial stocks like German Americans and Irish Americans would thus have contemporary policy consequences. When CPG was produced in 1909, the concept of independent Ireland did