My husband’s sister did the DNA test thing. She was shown to have 20% African ancestry. Their entire family is all from Italy, so geographically it makes sense, being so close to Northern Africa. But a part of me chuckles since their dad was kind of an Archie Bunker type. Not the most enlightened guy.
I remember reading an article years ago, which speculated that Hitler had Jewish and North African ancestry.
I think that we are all a mish-mosh to some degree.
I’m sure he blamed that 20% on Edith.
“I think that we are all a mish-mosh to some degree.”
Most Jews are not. Every member of my family who has tested came back 90-100 percent Ashkenazi Jewish. There are certainly other people who have some Jewish ancestory but most people who were raised Jewish by their bio Jewish parents are among the least “ mish mosh” group out there. Probably something to do with all the restrictions on Jews and where they could live
1/8 black? Close enough! ?
Can anyone cite a single instance where a college contested an applicant’s claimed race? There is no method for doing such.
Also, there are no consequences for gaming the system. Just look at Elizabeth Warren and the benefit she gained for so long as a “minority.” Did she pay back the millions she took in salary?
I don’t think Elizabeth Warren ever got an advantage for claiming she was a NA. She started listing N.A. when she already had a job at Harvard. It was just padding on her resume, but I don’t think she got millions in salary, and I think she would have received the exact same salary if she’d claimed to be 100% English or French or German.
Most Jews are not Ashkenazi.
I tested as something like 10% Ashkenazi. My sister somewhere just under 20%. My dad tested ~1/3 but his mom was an off-the-boat Ashkenazi Jew. Your DNA is not your ancestry. It’s simply not that accurate. It’s interesting, but not definitive for the vast majority of people/populations.
My mom was born in Spain and still has dual Spanish/US citizenship. I’m Hispanic. I stopped checking Hispanic on forms because it just got tiring having to explain how I claimed Hispanic heritage with blue eyes and an Irish O’Irish name. It really just wasn’t worth my while.
Both my mom and I have a significant amount of West & South Asian in our heritage because of our Romani heritage. Obviously, we’re not Asian and we’d never pass for Asian - any kind of Asian, including Middle Eastern - despite what our DNA says.
Anecdotes aside, lying about your race is 1- not a common problem and 2- pretty difficult to do in many places. It’s a consistent lie that you have to remember to keep up on every form, every transcript, etc. Schools (like those in MI where race-based AA is illegal) just use zip code as a proxy and therefore your stated race is irrelevant.
Also, reminder that Warren never used her race on any application. She informed universities after she had been hired/admitted and it had no bearing on admissions, promotions, etc.
Laughing at the idea that law professors get paid “millions.” Are you confusing law professors with football coaches?
“Most Jews are not Ashkenazi.”
Huh???
Every statistic I have seen indicates that 75-80 percent of Jews at least in the US are Ashkenazi. And about half of Israel’s Jews. I have never seen anything ever indicating that most Jews are not Ashkenazi. Where did you get that from?
Depends, we have good friends where the mother is 50% Native American and both her and her daughter are very involved with her tribe. Unfortunately the tribe requires 50% blood percentage to be registered so her DD is not registered but clearly looks like and is involved with her NA tribe. She would definitely be able to check the NA box.
FYI there are people on the Dawes rolls that have zero NA blood.
My friend is Ashkenazi, her husband Sephardic, so now their kids are mixed.
I met an interesting woman at their house on passover. The woman was Polish, but raised (maybe born) in Mexico. Her husband also Polish, but raised in Mexico in the same little Polish/Jewish enclave. I asked if she spoke Polish as well as Spanish. She only spoke Polish, not Spanish because they lived with on the enclave in Mexico. They’d lived in several cities in the US (husband a doctor), so her kids were not Mexican at all, but Polish. So she is ethnically Polish and Jewish, legally Mexican and American, but her DNA would probably show none of that except the Jewish.
@romanigypsyeyes So your mom descended from the gitanos celebrated by Federico Garcia Lorca? How fascinating! I was a huge fan of his when I was young.
Most Jews are Ashkenazi, and most Ashkenazim are related. DNA studies demonstrate that most Ashkenazim are descended from some few hundred ancestors sometime in the middle ages. If you dig deeper in time, they mostly are Middle Eastern men and a mix of Roman, and “barbarian” women. When I ran GEDMatch for my parents, each came out about 50% Middle Eastern (West Asia, NE Africa, Red Sea, East Mediterranean), about 25% Southern European, 10% North European, with various other DNA, including Eastern European, and (my father) about 5% Eastern and Southeastern Asian.
This DNA mix is fairly typical of Ashkenazi Jews, and at least my father clustered with Ashkenazi Jews. However, Ashkenazi Jews cluster between Levantine people, and Southern Europeans. Depending on the test, my mother will find herself Ashkenazi Jew or Italian.
There is a reason that curly hair and lactose intolerance are so common among Ashkenazi Jews.
The Mediterranean has no real boundaries, genetically. The Romans spread Southern European genes around North Africa and the Middle East, the Vandals spread Northern and central Europeans genes to Spain, Corsica, Sardinia, Northern Morocco, Algeria, and across Tunis. Arabs conquests spread Middle Eastern genes across North Africa, and into Spain and Europe, etc, etc.
A 4th great-grandparent (with me as Gen 1) would be 3.125% of DNA – in the family trees I’ve done, that gets us to early 1800s.
My understanding is that registration in Native American tribes didn’t happen until the early 20th century and that only people with a certain degree of tribal heritage could register. One could certainly be Native American but not have been eligible to register.
Have been on Jewish genealogy sites over the past two years as part of researching DH’s family, and there’s much discussion about what relationship X% might mean. A percentage number doesn’t necessarily mean all that DNA comes from one ancestor.
And for grins and giggles, a cousin who’s been researching our side of the tree found we are related to Pocahontas and a couple other interesting people. They all come through my dad’s mom, who grew up in extraordinary poverty in rural NW Arkansas.
I have a very small percentage of NA DNA and because of it, an even smaller bit of general Asian DNA. Going back to the Land Bridge, I suppose. When I was in the Yucatan, a tour guide told me that some people there have a purplish mark on their lower back that is similar to what some people from Mongolia have. Amazing to think of these traits circling the globe over thousands of years.
@CountingDown If you want to know what the % shared DNA means in Ashkenazi Jews, you need to know that lengths of the shared segments, not just the total amount. Even then, it all collapses after 5 or 6 generations, since Ashkenazi Jews are so interrelated, that a person can be an 8th cousin, or a 10th cousin from one ancestor, a 12th from another, and a 9th from another. As I wrote, fourth and fifth cousins can be differentiated from multiple distant relationships by the size of the shared DNA segments. However, even that loses reliability when measuring more distant relatives.
Basically, no Ashkenazi Jew is less than a 30th cousin of another Ashkenazi Jew. The only reason that there isn’t any more inbreeding problems is because there was such a large influx of Southern European DNA before the bottleneck, meaning that there was an increase in genetic diversity.
@greenwitch 10,000-14,000 years isn’t that long, especially when you consider that very little new DNA was added to the Native American genome after the land bridge closed, and that was all from Asia, as well. Since evidently the native American population mostly came from Central Asia, it’s cool and exciting, but not too surprising, to find traits that have been preserved.
@MWolf, I’ve learned about the CM segments, but wasn’t going to confuse the issue here, esp since I don’t have genetic data to play with and better understand. DH and sons don’t want to spit, and I don’t want my medical issues, if there’s some genetic component, to keep my sons from getting insurance. I also don’t want surprise relatives from other branches of the family contacting me.
OTOH, going through the historical records is lits of fun!
@greenwitch Mongolian blue spots are very common in all dark skinned peoples. African, South Asian, Asian, and Native American babies tend to have it.
Interesting discussion as the mom of two daughters born in China.
@twoinanddone, I get you. We raised our daughters as Americans but, since I am one generation off the boat, really with Italian heritage. Even living in a small town we never thought twice about their race, and neither did they, until it came to college admissions. Once my older daughter started checking the “Asian” box a lot of doors opened for her that we never had considered to be closed. Maybe it was the schools she chose, in the Midwest with low single-digit Asian populations.
My cousin got his DNA testing done, and came up with Italian and Greek (not a surprise given the area of Italy we are from) and African (which was a surprise but I guess shouldn’t have been). I agree with the poster upthread that we are all a mishmash one way or another via that first ancestor in Africa.
We had our DNA done and my husband’s came back 1 percent Sephardic Jewish, mine came back zero and my daughter’s came back less than 1 percent Azhkenazi and zero Sephardic. Very confusing to me.