There are far more than that many people with Newfoundland ancestry. Most of the major cities in Canada had thousands of Newfoundland-born residents at a time when they only had tens of thousands of residents.
Take Halifax, for example.
In 1921 it was home to 58,372 people. Of them, 2,719 were Newfoundland born (we know this exactly because they were, at that time, immigrants to Canada and had to be very well-documented).
That's 4.7% of Halifax's population. And that ONLY includes those born in Newfoundland. It doesn't include their children, or their grandchildren... and we all know how strongly our people cling to their culture through the generations, even when living elsewhere.
Now, generations later, the number of people in Halifax who can directly trace their ancestry to Newfoundland is certainly in the tens of thousands.
Other cities (Sydney, Cape Breton: 10.9% Newfoundland-born; Glace Bay, Cape Breton: 8% Newfoundland-born; Sydney MInes, Cape Breton: 5.7% Newfoundland-born) had similar numbers.
Even big Canadian cities, like Toronto and Montreal, had thousands of us at a time when their populations were small:
Toronto: 1,976 Newfoundland-born residents out of 512,893.
Montreal: 2,027 Newfoundland-born residents out of 618,506.
I guarantee you there are probably a couple million of us around the world by now.
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Note to self: "The plural of anecdote is not evidence."
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