Despite leaving behind a Yiddish-speaking home in Latvia when he came to America in 1909, Sam Gold always told his children and grandchildren that they were Sephardic Jews.
Many decades later his granddaughter Judy Simon, 60, would finally confirm her grandfather was not meshugana.
In 2004, after genetic testing became widely available for genealogists, Simon took a cheek swab from a male cousin and had his Y chromosome DNA tested.
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I think that with these genealogical DNA tests that groups like FamilyTreeDNA and the Genographic Project at NatGeo do that folks should understand what a very tiny % of the origins of their DNA is actually evaluated. For example, Y-DNA testing only tests your singular paternal (male-to-male-to-male, etc.) lineage. This means that after 10 generations (appx. 250 years bp - about 1750-60) you are looking at only 1 out of the 1,028 people who contributed DNA to you. The influence of the other 1,027 is not directly considered. This is true whether you are looking at either Y-DNA or mt-DNA. As you go back the number doubles with each generation, so 11 gens back the number is over 2000, etc., etc. It is exciting but keep it in perspective ... we are all brothers & sisters at the cellular level.
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