19
I think the answer is simply that these DNA testing companies are all American companies and have primarily targeted the American, European, and Australian markets. I suspect they have a comparatively small number of customers in the Middle East and Caucasus.
23andme only ships to 50 countries, and only two countries in the Middle East (Israel and Cyprus).
...
16
The rule for this style of accounting is straightforward: a person is 50% what their mother was and 50% what their father was.
Sometimes one will want to simplify a result. For instance, if your mother is Russian and your father is half Russian and half Chinese, then you are 50% Russian plus 50% half-Russian-half-Chinese, which you can simplify like this:...
13
Biologically, it is not certain that you will inherit some DNA from each grandparent, great grandparent, etc. At each generation, the DNA is a random mix of the DNA from each parent, each of which are in turn a random mix of their parents. Given enough generations, randomly some DNA from early ancestors may be lost. In fact, there's a 1 in 64 chance that ...
10
In addition to the answers given above, sometimes it's important to know who is counting. What does it mean to be Jewish? According to Jewish tradition, to be Jewish, your mother had be Jewish. (Exercise in recursion left to the reader.) But (for example) in the Soviet Union, the government determined race (and put it in your passport so that everybody would ...
9
Ashkenazi Surnames really only came about in the early 1800s actually. The Jews of Western Europe (Germany, France, and England etc) took surnames sooner than their coreligionists in Eastern Europe. In fact, the Jews of Eastern Europe were only required to choose family names because of an edict from the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II after he had allowed Jews ...
9
I think it is Новоград-Волинський, which is transliterated as Novohrad-Volyns'kyi, Novograd-Volinskiy, etc. and is also known as Zhvil, Zvil, etc. This is in the Zhytomyr Oblast in northern Ukraine. If this is the correct location, unfortunately there are probably no relatives left.
I searched on Fold3 for "Swel, Russia" and found two men in the WWII "Old ...
8
For Jewish information on Romania, I recommend two sources of information to go to first:
The JewishGen site has the best online selection of Jewish resources for Romania
The Avotaynu journal has been published quarterly for 25 years and has the best articles available on Jewish Research. Over that time, they've published 33 articles on Romania. The ...
8
You didn't include which country your grandparents emigrated to or where your father was born. Later official records in the new country (naturalization, application for social security or equivalent) may include the place or the region of your grandfather's birth. Could there be keepsakes or letters from relatives somewhere in storage? These may provide old ...
8
So the basic question is this: does the DNA of Jews from the Ukraine differ from the DNA of Jews living in Germany, and can this difference be detected reliably?
To answer very simply: No.
There isn't any discernible difference between the DNA of Ashkenazi Jews who lived in one country vs another. Ashkenazi Jews always have DNA matches with other ...
8
Your best bet is to check the International Association of Jewish Genealogy Societies: IAJGS International Jewish Cemetery Project.
On their United States Page, they have almost 1400 Jewish burial sites cataloged from every state. One burial site (e.g. a town or district) may contain several Jewish cemeteries.
They try to give location and contact ...
7
A completely different direction - is it clear that the name wasn't written by that person themselves in cyrillic script?
The image can also be read as Russian cursive handwriting, spelling 'Одес', which can be interpretted as Odessa, a major city in current Ukraine.
7
The first thing to do would be to try to find your father (and his then family) in the 1940 Census (possible here at Family Search or several other information providers). If his surname is very distinctive, you may not have too many candidates in NYC to consider.
If you are very fortunate and the daughter's birth was before, or in, 1939 that might be ...
7
You could try MyHeritage DNA. They are the DNA Branch of MyHeritage based in Israel, and they have a larger portion of European and Middle East customers than the other DNA testing companies.
They just started their DNA testing about a year ago, so their number of testers is smaller than the other testing companies, but may be able to grow very large due to ...
6
If your father lived in New York, there may be limits on how much information you have access to because of privacy restrictions. I think this is a case where you will be much better off hiring a professional to help you, especially since you live outside of the USA. There are several questions on this site about doing research in New York, and some on ...
6
These notations should appear on Russian Empire Revision Lists (which were kind of like census lists). That is, if a son was present in the 9th Revision List but not the 10th, the 10th would say that Yankel, born 18XX and age XX in the 9th list, had been serving in the army since 18XX, and therefore was not present for the 10th list that year.
...
6
I think it might be Sudlikov. There's a Sudilkov, Ukraine, which gets more matches on Google (see http://grossmanproject.net/sudilkov_jewish_history.htm). But Sudlikov shows up too (eg http://www.antiquejewishbooks.net/522.html). So I'm not sure if they were the same place.
6
I am not an expert, but am adding my humble bits to the answer:
There is no such thing as a jewish surname, indeed.
First of all a surname itself is not a jewish thing. Jews are not indetified by their surname in anything religious. Jews were always identified as "Isaac son of Abraham" and the likes.
Being summoned to read a portion of the Torah in the ...
6
Unfortunately, the DNA companies imply way more accuracy to their estimates by including percentages to one decimal point. Let me rephrase your results as they should have been stated:
My father is from 85% to 100% European (85% to 100% Ashkenazi, 0% to 10% Baltic, and 0% to 10% Italian), 0% to 10% West Asian, and 0% to 5% Central Asian.
My mother is 80% to ...
6
The results from this Ashkenazic Shared DNA Survey should be of interest to you:
https://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com/2018/05/ashkenazic-shared-dna-survey-data-by.html?m=1
That 57.4 cM longest match is close to the average for second cousins in table 2, which is only for people with 100% Ashkenazic ancestry. Your father's 348.3 cM total shared cM is also ...
6
What I see often said is that any matching segments under 5 cM, if not under 7 cM, are more likely to be identical by chance rather than by descent, and should usually be disregarded as noise.
A Small Segment Round-Up (Blaine Bettinger posted 29 December 2017 on his blog The Genetic Genealogist)
Sharing Large Segments With a Match Does Not Validate Small ...
5
Bad news: you very likely can't get access to a NYC birth certificate from someone who is not your parent from the 1943-1947 time period.
Good news: you can check the NYC birth index and confirm that a birth really did take place in that time period, get the exact date, get the borough (county), and get the certificate number. A borough will help narrow ...
5
This is a stub of an answer which will be added to as I find more resources. I'll write out a Research Plan to give you some ideas. You may have done a lot of this already, and if you have, feel free to add to your question. But I'll start from scratch, so the information may also help someone coming along later. Since you asked specifically about Jewish ...
5
I grew up hearing all those statements as well and the best answer I can offer you is that, DNA testing is the best way to see the percentage of ethnicity your lineage contains. We can go back as many generations as we like and still not get the true I'm a third Cherokee, half Irish, one eighth Dutch, & one eight German, or a Heinz 57 (what my Father ...
5
A DNA test will reliably distinguish between members of two populations:
if the populations had distinct ancestors
or they have been isolated for a very long period since their last
common ancestors
and a characteristic non-deleterious mutation occured in only one
population
and that mutation has become widespread and stable within the population
...
5
A good resource is The Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland and other Slavic Countries
Looking for names similar to Soodlikov, one finds Sudilowka on p 550 of volume XI which tells one to look at the entry Sudylków. Sudylków is found on p 553 of volume XI where it is described over a two columns. Sudylków is on the river Kosecka. In 1870 there ...
5
Those are very close matches, even for an endogamous population.
A match of 824.7 cM for your mother with him would normally indicate (in a non-endogamous population) that she might be his great-aunt or 1st cousins.
Lara Diamond just wrote a post: Endogamy in Practice: Updated where she compared all her 100% Askenazi Jewish matches with their ISOGG ...
5
If he was indeed a British citizen then any marriage might (but might not) have been registered with the local British consulate in which case you ought to find the marriage in the consular marriage index. FindMyPast seem to have two different databases for that index:
British Nationals Married Overseas 1818-2005
British Overseas Marriages
If you do find ...
5
The normal way that JewishGen represents Ukrainian birth records is like this:
where in the second column, the top box contains the father's name (Ber) above the father's father's name (Perel). So the father of Froim is Ber son of Perel.
Similarly the middle box contain the mother's name (Blyuma) above the mother's father's name (Meer). So the mother of ...
4
There is a coordinated effort going on now at the JewishGen website, where they are using the services of Family Tree DNA to help Jewish Genealogists identify their origins.
There are many projects going on (e.g. Surname projects) which include a collection of Regional Geographical Projects, one of which is a German-Jewish SIG.
They would not be doing ...
4
The good news is that over 100,000 Jewish birth, marriage, and death records from Lviv (Lwow, Lemberg) have been transcribed and put online for free searching in Gesher Galicia's All Galicia Database:
http://search.geshergalicia.org/
The bad news is that I don't see anyone there named "Mühlgay". Could your great-grandfather have had a different surname ...
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