My husband and I just got our DNA results back; and I have 2 questions: 1- Does the 23andMe have the LDS influence? I'm hoping that it's independent from the church. And 2- My husband has a small percentage of Ashkenazi Jewish. Does this come through the maternal line?

Ancestry is the LDS connected company. I also had a small percentage of Ashkenazi Jewish. I'm still tracing it but the origin seems to be through my mother/Grandmother. My understanding is that yes, it comes from the maternal line.

Which brings up the question;
If Ancestry is an arm of LDS inc, can they be trusted? They may have a plan to eventually have a majority of people traced back to Joe Smith or something like that. I don't trust any business owned by mormons or run by mormons.

Ancestry is Mormon-owned, but not by the church itself. It has had a cooperative relationship with the church in that the church gives Ancestry genealogy information, and church members get free access.

Anything with church agreements is suspect. The church, through it many arms, have financial interests in many businesses that are intentionally obscure. Including Utah government and politicians businesses.

I understand they withhold reports of Neanderthal genes because, well, there were no Neanderthals.

Seriously? How funny.

I have no sub-Saharan African in my DNA makeup. I do have Neanderthal.

:)

You would need to ask 23andMe how they determine Ashkenazi contribution. They won't give you anything exact, as those algorithms are the secret sauce of these companies. They should be willing to say roughly the extent that autosomal, Y chromosome and mtDNA weigh in for Ashkenazi result. Maybe they have an existing document or at least FAQ entry on that somewhere on their site.

I don't think any of them can be trusted. 23andMe was founded by the woman who is married to the guy who founded Google (don't make me look up their names).

So, I'm curious that if 23andMe reveals that you come from the long line of flakey-skinned folks, will ads starting popping up on your mobile device for Gold Bond medicated cream?

My guess is that both these gigs--Ancestry and 23andMe--are going for drug patents.

MyHeritage headquarters is also now in Provo (it used to be in the UK.) So it's been bought out by Ancestry or has merged by a parent company.

Ashkenazi heritage is determined via the mother's lineage, per my understanding. If you get yours tested as a female, your DNA would yield different results from your brothers or your father's based on their patrilineal DNA testing only the males share independently of the females. So even say if your dad had some Ashkenazi in his DNA it wouldn't show in yours, but it would in your brothers. Whereas i f it's in your mom's it will show in both your brothers and your own.

My mother's brother like herself descended from Ashkenazi Jewish grandmothers and her mother of Jewish/Protestant Irish descent.

My uncle had his DNA tested through 23 and me like I did. His Ashkenazi DNA is over 30%. Mine is 11.4%. My mom's should have been the same as his if she'd had hers tested in her lifetime (she didn't.) So it's a curiosity to me why I have less than half of what he has or my mom would have if she'd had hers tested. Weird science. Theirs was only through their mothers side. Not their father's.

23 and Me is not affiliated to Ancestry. But my DNA test is linked to other DNA sites via 23 and Me that I volunteer to share it with.

With your Jewish ancestry, it means you descended (it is described on your DNA results,) from one of the four Jewish women who migrated from Middle Asia between 700 years ago to 2,000 years ago. They didn't necessarily migrate at the same time (but they could have.) About 40% of all the European Ashkenazi Jewry leading up to WWII descended from one of those four women. All the Ashkenazi DNA positive test results trace back to those four women.

If you have Ashkenazi Jewish in your DNA chances are good you are cousins by some degree of other Ashkenazi Jews in the world.

Hello there cuzzin! :-)

23 and Me does the science of sequencing and sequence comparison in labs in the Research Triangle now i believe, their headquarters are still in Mountain View, CA. I don't trust it 100% but I don't think Mormons are involved in controlling this process. I have a few friends that work at 23 and Me.

You can't trust these mail-in DNA services.

https://www.thedoctorstv.com/articles/3863-the-triplets-put-ancestry-kits-to-the-test

I'd heard these three sisters were raising a bit of hell on this subject. Props to them...

My post linking the Nature article below contrasts what the science is saying versus what the salesmen (and sales women) are hyping...

My therapist believed he was 100% Italian. His wife is an avid genealogist, so he finally did his DNA recently. Surprise, surprise, he discovered he is 19% Ashkenazi Jewish!

:-)

It's been very interesting and surprising to see our DNA results. Amyjo, thank you for all the information; the information on the four Jewish women is something I hadn't learned before this. That's one of the things I enjoy about this forum; I learn something new every time I read here. And hello cousin to you too! :)

I haven't been able to get my son to do his yet. Maybe someday he'll get the "bug" to want to get his done.

His paternal grandmother was a Warsaw Ghetto orphan whose Jewish parents were murdered in the Holocaust. So my children with my ex-husband will likely have more Jewish DNA *if* their grandmother carried the Ashkenazi DNA strain. Not all European Jewry did, or does. App 60% in fact did not.

My uncle is the only close relative in my family who's had his tested. He's the crazy mad scientist/genius/turned dark side Darth Vader style since he went rogue some years back re-inventing himself from a scientist into a con artist. So I've cut off all ties to him, including on 23 and me. He's my closest DNA relative there, yet I have nothing to do with him after he looted the town where I live. Made off with tens of thousands of dollars. He's never come clean. He's still in denial.

The Jewish side of the family tree if you're able to trace your roots however, can be very fulfilling in terms of understanding your heritage on that side of your family tree. For me, it helps make up for my crazy uncle somewhat. He rejects his Ashkenazi Jewish heritage; he's irreligious. All he wants to learn from his DNA is whether he has any relatives on his dad's side (both his parents were orphans, and he didn't know of any relatives growing up.) My mom spent her early years trying to trace her family roots. Even long before she converted to Mormonism, after marrying dad. The only relatives they had as children were friends and neighbors they "adopted."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/2018 12:16PM by Amyjo.

My kids had this done, I'm still waiting to hear back from them as to what it says.

How exciting!

:)

I just signed up yesterday for Family Tree DNA's full line of testing - y-chromosome, mitochondrial, and autosomal DNA. According to the very detailed genealogy records from both sides of the family, available and extensively documented on Family Search, I should be exactly 5/8 British and 3/8 Scandinavian. (So almost entirely Northern European.). I can't wait to see what really comes up!!! I find it hard to believe that all those ancestors going back hundreds of years "obeyed the law of chastity", so to speak.

I work in a microbiology research lab. Several coworkers received Ancestry DNA test kits for Christmas, and they've all been terribly disappointed when I tell them that Ancestry is Mormon-owned and they won't find anything about their Neanderthal DNA (because of Adam and Eve, you know).

I'm more than 30% British and Irish. Followed by Ashkenazi. Followed by German and French. Followed by 3% Scandinavian. Basically I'm 100% European with a 0.1% Native American ancestor in my DNA. She's on both sides of the family tree - both mom's and dad's.

The Neanderthals came from the Neander Valley in Germany. That would make them German, would it not?

Long before it was Germany, hihi. :)

Ouch!! What this is saying is that less than 10% of Ashkenazi maternal lines can be traced back to the Near East or Caucasus.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543

>>The origins of Ashkenazi Jews remain highly controversial. Like Judaism, mitochondrial DNA is passed along the maternal line. Its variation in the Ashkenazim is highly distinctive, with four major and numerous minor founders. However, due to their rarity in the general population, these founders have been difficult to trace to a source. Here we show that all four major founders, ~40% of Ashkenazi mtDNA variation, have ancestry in prehistoric Europe, rather than the Near East or Caucasus. Furthermore, most of the remaining minor founders share a similar deep European ancestry. Thus the great majority of Ashkenazi maternal lineages were not brought from the Levant, as commonly supposed, nor recruited in the Caucasus, as sometimes suggested, but assimilated within Europe. These results point to a significant role for the conversion of women in the formation of Ashkenazi communities, and provide the foundation for a detailed reconstruction of Ashkenazi genealogical history.

>>The Ashkenazim are thought to have emerged from dispersals north into the Rhineland of Mediterranean Jews in the early Middle Ages, although there is little evidence before the twelfth century. After expulsions from Western Europe between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, the communities are thought to have expanded eastwards, especially in Poland, Lithuania and then Russia.

>>We are then faced with several competing models for Ashkenazi origins: a Levantine ancestry; a Mediterranean/west European ancestry; a North Caucasian ancestry; or, of course, a blend of these. This seems an ideal problem to tackle with genetic analysis, but after decades of intensive study a definitive answer remains elusive.

My antennae perked up with that "maternal line" statement; this clearly pointed to mitochondrial DNA--inherited from one's mother--as the "source evidence" for this claim; however...

>>The maternal line has also been studied, and indeed Ashkenazi mtDNAs are highly distinctive, but they have proved difficult to assign to a source population. Some progress has been made by targeting whole-mtDNA genomes or mitogenomes, which provide much higher genealogical (and therefore geographical) and chronological resolution than the control-region sequences used previously...

>>Overall, we estimate that most (>80%) Ashkenazi mtDNAs were assimilated within Europe. Few derive from a Near Eastern source, and despite the recent revival of the ‘Khazar hypothesis,' virtually none are likely to have ancestry in the North Caucasus. Therefore, whereas on the male side there may have been a significant Near Eastern (and possibly east European/Caucasian) component in Ashkenazi ancestry, the maternal lineages mainly trace back to prehistoric Western Europe. These results emphasize the importance of recruitment of local women and conversion in the formation of Ashkenazi communities, and represent a significant step in the detailed reconstruction of Ashkenazi genealogical history.

>>Previous researchers proposed a Levantine origin for the three Ashkenazi K founders from several indirect lines of evidence: shared ancestry with non-Ashkenazi Jews, shared recent ancestry with Mediterranean samples, and their absence from amongst non-Jews, and this suggestion has been widely accepted. However, our much more detailed analyses show that two of the major Ashkenazi haplogroup K lineages, K1a1b1a and K2a2a1 have a deep European ancestry, tracing back at least as far as the early and mid-Holocene respectively.

>>The heavy concentration of Near Eastern haplogroup K lineages within particular, distinct subclades of the tree, and indeed the lack of haplogroup K lineages in Samaritans, who might be expected to have shared an ancestral gene pool with ancient Israelites, both strongly imply that we are unlikely to have missed a hitherto undetected Levantine ‘reservoir’ of haplogroup K variation.

>>Fewer than 10% of the Ashkenazi mtDNAs can be assigned to a Near Eastern source with any confidence, and these are found at very low frequencies...

Have fun...

From the 23 and Me registry on Ashkenazi Jewry, it explains the following:

"Tracing the Maternal Founders of the Ashkenazi Jews
K1a1b1a

A few branches of haplogroup K, such as K1a9, K2a2a, and K1a1b1a, are specific to Jewish populations and especially to Ashkenazi Jews, whose roots lie in central and eastern Europe. These branches of haplogroup K are found at levels of 30% among the Ashkenazim. But they are also found at lower levels in Jewish populations from the Middle East and Africa, and among Sephardic Jews who trace their roots to medieval Spain. That indicates an origin of those K haplogroup branches in the Middle East before 70 AD, when the Roman destruction of Jerusalem scattered the Jewish people around the Mediterranean and beyond.

About 1.7 million Ashkenazi Jews living today (nearly 20% of the population) share a single branch of the K haplogroup, K1a1b1a. The diversity of that haplogroup suggests that it arose in the Middle East between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, and that everyone who shares it today could descend from a woman who lived as recently as 700 years ago. A similar pattern in two other K branches, K1a9 and K2a2, as well as the N1b branch of haplogroup N, has led researchers to conclude that 40% of the Ashkenazim living today – about 3.4 million people – could descend from as few as four women who lived within the last 2,000 years."

What actual peer-reviewed science and scientists are saying versus what the agenda-driven sales sorts are offering, whom should I believe?

And that, boys and girls, is why they were never able to baptize me no matter how hot-and-bothered the bishop's daughter had me.

Especially FOUR of them !!!!

https://assets.rbl.ms/13457504/980x.jpg

(The science is in the DNA. And DNA doesn't lie.)

Hey, Mary was a Jewish mother, and that whole Immaculate Conception story started with her...

Where do you think "Mary had a little lamb," came from?

Don't argue with Jewish mothers with illegitimate children. They never lie (about their children's provenance!).

Actually, the reason why "If the mother is Jewish, so are her children," is because of Jewish women being raped throughout the centuries by Crusaders and invaders to their homelands, or where they had wandered escaping persecution.

So it became established law that if the mother is Jewish so are her children. That has been Halacha Jewish law to this day.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/11/2018 03:13PM by Amyjo.

Amyjo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Actually, the reason why "If the mother is Jewish,
> so are her children," is because of Jewish women
> being raped throughout the centuries by Crusaders
> and invaders to their homelands, or where they had
> wandered escaping persecution.
>
> So it became established law that if the mother is
> Jewish so are her children. That has been Halacha
> Jewish law to this day.

This is true.

I was also taught that there is also another reason as well: In ancient times and among ancient peoples in that part of the world, there was a sort of "gentleman's agreement" among all of them that the religion of a child's mother was the religion of the child.

(This had a great deal of relevance in a huge region populated by many different peoples and many different religions, where a high percentage of females---a good share of them prepubescent girls---were slaves, concubines, plural wives...or, as Amyjo said, were often impregnated as a result of rape.)

This is fine. My FIL was an atheist Russian Jew but his wife was from the Anjou region of France (and atheist), my wife is an atheist and so are my children...

This works for me ;-)

Tom in Paris

Which in a way relates to my child born out of wedlock that was lost to LDSSS when I was a teenager.

I was a minor, involved with a much older man. By the laws of the state where I lived at the time, such a relationship was considered to be statutory rape. It wasn't consensual either, not at first anyway. So legally speaking I'd been raped by the father of my baby at the time my child was conceived. Nonetheless, the Mormon church treated me as a sinner rather than a crime victim. No charges were ever filed against the father - although they could have been.

My child from that "union" is most certainly as Jewish as any Jewish child born today in or outside of wedlock.

He'd have gone a lifetime without knowing were it not for my finding him when I did a few years back. Now he knows where he came from. He also knows the ethnicity of his birth father. He'd been deprived of knowing either by the cult who handled the adoption and erased his birth parents information from him permanently, so they thought (until I located him at long last.)

His girlfriend was Jewish when I found him. She had NO IDEA she was dating a Jewish guy until he learned from me he's fully Jewish because his birth mother is. It was quite a revelation for him.

And for his girlfriend. Her mother's wish for her daughter was she'd meet a nice Jewish man someday. And she finally did. :-)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/11/2018 03:45PM by Amyjo.

Amyjo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> And for his girlfriend. Her mother's wish for her
> daughter was she'd meet a nice Jewish man someday.
> And she finally did. :-)

:D :D :D

I am happy for both of them...and for YOU!!!

Jesus Christ was an illegitimate child btw.

His Jewishness was never in doubt.

Amyjo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Jesus Christ was an illegitimate child btw.

Weren't Mary and Joseph betrothed?

If so, then Jesus was not Jewishly illegitimate, because a "betrothal" in [particularly ancient] Jewish terms was, in effect [in OUR terms] a kind of pre-marriage, which could ONLY be dissolved with a get (a formal "bill of divorcement").

Betrothed Jews could (and frequently did!) have sex.

If Joseph's sperm had nothing to do with Jesus's conception, then yes, Jesus could be considered (by our terms today) illegitimate, but in those days---millennia before biological tests---regardless of the biology, Joseph would have been credited, by Jewish law, as Jesus's father.



> His Jewishness was never in doubt.

True---and this is regardless of any facts relating to paternal biology.

Why are we using the term illegitimate? My children were all born out of wedlock, but the French consider them my "enfants naturels" - natural children.

So much nicer.

Tom in Paris



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/11/2018 03:38PM by Soft Machine.

Soft Machine Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Why are we using the term illegitimate? My
> children were all born out of wedlock, but the
> French consider them my "enfants naturels" -
> natural children.
>
> So much nicer.
>
> Tom in Paris

I absolutely agree with this, Tom.

Especially for me, personally. ;)

I like that too.

:)

I meant only in the sense that Joseph wasn't his true father.

If Jesus was truly a product of an "immaculate conception," that would still make him illegitimate, would it not?

Even if Mary were married to Joseph? I get no one would be any the wiser. Except for Mary and Joseph, and whoever else held the "key" of a sperm donor.

On the other hand, it makes sense that since Mary was married at the time he was born, he wasn't "illegitimate," in the eyes of society. But he was technically speaking.

Amyjo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I meant only in the sense that Joseph wasn't his
> true father.
>
> If Jesus was truly a product of an "immaculate
> conception," that would still make him
> illegitimate, would it not?

This is an interesting question. I think (but I am not sure) the answer may have something to do with our contemporary conception of "illegitimacy." I think in ancient times, this CONCEPT, at least as WE think of it, may not have existed.


> On the other hand, it makes sense that since Mary
> was married at the time he was born, he wasn't
> "illegitimate," in the eyes of society. But he was
> technically speaking.

Yeah, I guess so...

By our terms: Yes.

By the terms of those people, back then: No.


Part of our problem in trying to understand this today is that people thought in different conceptual ways back then. (They had to, since they had little real knowledge of biology beyond the most fundamental basics...and sometimes the things they THOUGHT they "knew" back then were not actually, biologically, true.)

So, by our terms today, yes...Jesus would probably be considered illegitimate.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/11/2018 03:53PM by Tevai.

I have not paid for a DNA test....to friggin' cheap. But when I found my birth family a couple years ago I learned that my birth mother's family traces their heritage to Devon and Cornwall in SW England. My birth father's surname was Scott.....and my adoption papers listed my heritage as Irish!....go figure....but I do have a great grandmother on my birth mother's side with the surname Fitzpatrick so I do have some Irish blood in my veins.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/10/2018 10:45PM by Lethbridge Reprobate.

I wouldn’t believe any of these DNA test are connected to ancestry.com. Are used our live-in housekeeper who is from Honduras and sent in under my name. It came back Eastern European. Also noticed that they will never mail you anything because they don’t want to be involved in any kind of mail fraud you just have to go get your results online. Whatever I’m a skeptic when it comes to anything connected to Mormonism

Your housekeeper could be from Honduras with Eastern European ancestry.

I'm 100% all American. My ancestry composition is 100% European, with a trace of Native American.

People migrate all over the globe. It happens.