Nebraska : Demographics

Nebraska ancestry includes Germans, English, Irish, Czech, and Swedish. According to the 2000 census, 661,133 identified their ancestry as German, 163,651 as English, 229,805 as Irish, 93,286 as Czech, and 84,294 as Swedish. The 2000 population also included 68,541 black Americans, 21,931 Asians, and 836 Pacific Islanders. There were 94,425 Hispanics and Latinos in 2000, representing 5.5% of the total population. There were 14,896 American Indians in Nebraska as of 2000, down from around 16,000 in 1990.

Nebraska's religious history derives from its patterns of immigration. German and Scandinavian settlers were mostly Lutherans while Irish, Polish, and Czech immigrants were Roman Catholic. Methodism and other Protestant religions were spread by settlers from other Midwestern states.

Though Protestants collectively outnumber Catholics, the Roman Catholic Church is the largest single Christian denomination within the state with about 372,791 adherents. Lutherans constituted the largest Protestant group with 117,419 adherents of the Missouri Synod, 128,570 of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and 5,829 of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. The Jewish population was estimated at 7,100 in 2000 while Muslims numbered about 3,115.