Genealogy Chat

Hi, I have read several articles about this but find it very confusing. My great great grandmother is said to have been Jewish but ran away and married outside the faith and her family disowned her. She appears to have married under another name, her origional name was Cohen. Her daughter, my great grandmother seems to have married a gentile but still all of her children would have been considered Jewish as it is passed down the female line. My grandfather married a gentile and so the Jewishness stopped there. Therefore my father was not Jewish and neither am I. If I were considering DNA testing particularly looking for Jewish /Cohen ancestry would I (female) or my brother be more suitable for testing or are we both to far removed to get a result.
Thanks.

I don't know anything about testing for Jewish DNA




But I do see too many "suppositions" and "hearsays" in you family history.





I would suggest that you gather together all the documentary evidence that you can ..................... buy marriage certificates, birth certificates, find the census returns, baptisms, etc.


Those will help you to sort out whether your gt gt grandmother "said to have been Jewish" was true, where she married (in a church or ????), possibly was she baptised before marriage, were her children baptised;


Also, whether your gt grandmother "seems to have married a gentile", where did she marry, was she baptised, etc etc

Is there such a thing as 'Jewish' DNA?

I know very little about the subject, having avoided it, as I feel that most of the companies offering such tests are purely in it for financial gain, and hardly anything of value ever comes out of their tests.

BUT............as Sylvia so rightly says..............get your documented FH sorted out first

Like Reggie I too do not think there is such a thing as Jewish DNA

However, by research you can ascertain the sect of Judaism

Such as they did with Nigella Lawson on her episode of WDYTYA

And that is what most people of Jewish extraction want to know.

And remember, the Jewish religion is a Matriacal society, so you can only be considered Jewish if your mother was. ;-)

This is fairly clear as to what you could expect from testing male or female.

http://www.jewishgen.org/dna/genbygen.html

I copied the OP question to a friend. This is the reply:-

yes indeed, there is such thing as DNA testing for Jewish ancestry. My father in fact had it done and his Y chromosome harks back to the middle east for well over five thousand years. There are some very common patterns of DNA in the Jewish communities, which are shared between the "Ashkenazi" and "Sephardi" communities. Wikipedia gives an overview but don't know how accurate the summary is though it does contain some interesting information.
This site: http://www.jewishgen.org/JewishGen/Who.html would seem one of the best to ascertain Jewish ancestry.

(I see Sirius has also posted that site)

the Jewish Gen link Sirius gave offers a very complete description of the whats and hows of DNA testing for this purpose

for finding actual family relationships, you need a male-line descendant of a man whose ethnicity through his father (and father's father etc.) you want to test, because only YDNA (male line DNA) identifies common recent ancestry (and it does that only if someone else has tested who is a match for the YDNA) -- but even without a match the Y haplogroup itself can identify ethnic heritage as Inky1's friend says

for the mitrochondrial DNA that might indicate a Jewish ethnicity, you need a female-line descendant, or a male in the female line (i.e. a son of a woman whose line it is, but not a son of a son)

it's a little too complicated to explain briefly, but the upshot is that it depends on who you have available to test -- maybe not in your immediate family but perhaps your recent ancestors had siblings who produced male-line or female-line descendants now living?

what you have at the moment is a female ancestor whose grandson (with a non-Jewish father) is your ancestor, so that breaks both chains

however if he - your grandfather - is still living, he would carry his grandmother's mitochondrial DNA through his mother and he could test for that

if your grandfather had a sister who had a daughter, she would be a female-line descendant who could test

or if you could identify your great-great-grandmother's siblings and trace their descendants, you might find a male-line or female-line descendant who could test

(of course in that case you might find that you were able to locate someone who knows the family history and can just tell you without testing :-) )

I think I would start by subscribing to the JewishGen DNA testing discussion group and ask your questions there

https://www.jewishgen.org/CURE/index.asp?from=http://www.jewishgen.org/ListManager/members_add.asp

Wow! Thanks you all, especially those with detailed info on the testing. We have of course gathered all of the paperwork, talked with family and followed every obvious line of enquiry with no success, hence the idea of genetic testing. Lesley

Worth contacting:

The Jewish Museum, Raymond Burton House, 129-131 Albert Street, London NW1 7NB
0207 284 7384
www.jewishmuseum.org.uk