Working with Jewish DNA Test Results
By Kitty Munson Cooper
Blogging at blog.kittycooper.com
Questions people hope to answer with DNA testing are:
Where are my ancestors from?
Do I have any unknown relatives out there?
Am I related to ... those other ENGELs (or Goldbergs or Cohens or other family name)?
Do I have any unknown relatives out there?
Do I have any unknown relatives out there?
When you are European Jewish (Ashkenazi) then your DNA test will not tell you where your ancestors are from as will likely look like this
Or maybe like this
These are the results shown at Ancestry
Same Person at 23andMe
Anything that is 1% or less is likely noise
Same Person at FamilyTreeDNA
Anything that is 1% or less is likely noise
Same Person at MyHeritage
In General, MyHeritage is not as accurate for Ashkenazi
Or maybe like this at GEDmatch
This is the Jtest calculator, an option in the Eurogenes admix analyzer ... mainly used by people who think they might have some Jewish ancestry to see if they do
My jewish friend Ellen had a family story that her grandad was really a Hungarian nobleman
Hmm, well I could tell her that yes he was not Jewish
But sometimes you think you are 100% Jewish and there is a surprise
Author Dani Shapiro discovered that her parents had used a non jewish sperm donor and never told her!
The problem with looking for relatives with Jewish DNA tests is that we are all related!
MyHeritage Matches for a Galician, Lithuanian and Polish Jewish person
Aunt Shaindel is found!
Lara Diamond is collecting Ashkenazi data: recent report is here: https://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com/2022/08/ashkenazic-shared-dna-survey-august.html
Close relationships are within the normal range but at the high end, the average is about 100-200 cM larger than the norm
Cousin Statistics from the ISOGG Wiki
Above, results in my family, see also this paper
academia.edu/7236789/Why_Autosomal_DNA_Test_Results_Are_Significantly_Different_for_Ashkenazi_Jews
Another success story written up on my blog about a holocaust survivor who found family he did not know had survived
https://blog.kittycooper.com/2014/11/using-ashkenazi-jewish-dna-to-find-family/
That post includes advice from a search angel who works extensively with Jewish DNA
https://blog.kittycooper.com/2014/11/using-ashkenazi-jewish-dna-to-find-family/
Key Advice:
ABSOLUTE MUST – get the locations for your immigrant ancestors. Born in “Russia” does not count. Get the shtetl name! Look for naturalizations, passenger records, marriage records. Death records are seldom useful – but you never know.
My fully Jewish late husband Steve did an ancestry DNA test and found a number of 2nd cousin level matches he did not know. All managed by one person, Mina, clearly a serious genealogist
The highest match was to her brother, her match was only 120 cM
with a largest segment of 40
Kitty's Guidelines for Jewish DNA Matches worth following up on
- At least one segment > 20 cM
- more than 2 segments
- at least 90 cM shared
There are several online relationship calculators worth using
DNApainter has one at dnapainter.com/tools/sharedcmv4
Enter the total cM or % and the likely relationships appear
Enter the total cM or % and only the possible relationships appear in color in the chart
The "G" trick
The cousin level = the number of "G"s , else the greats plus one
If you are in different generations take the shorter path and the other is removed by the generation difference
Simplified version of the relationship chart from the ISOGG wiki (courtesy Dimario, Wikimedia Commons)
A big problem with Jewish cousin research is that so many people, like my husband, have trees back only to their grandparents
One first cousin once removed of Steve's is tested at Ancestry who matched Mina and her brother so I knew it was either his Tieger or his Lilien line
Mina uploaded to GEDmatch so I could see whether she matched the Lilien cousin there
GEDmatch was founded to let you compare GEDCOMs and autosomal DNA results from different companies with powerful analysis tools
A problem is that the various DNA testing companies test different SNP sets which are not the same although there is much overlapping
So GEDmatch developed a special template for comparing them !
Checking whether or not Steve shares significant X with Mina and her brother SS could help figure this out since a man passes a Y to his son thus no X
Steve shared no X with SS and one medium sized piece with Mina
The next step was to look through Mina's tree for locations where her grandparents were born.
Her ancestors included the Igel/Eagle family of Solotwina and I knew Steve's mother's father's TIEGER family was also from that town
Further investigation found that Mina's great grandmother Malcha was likely a Tieger and the sister of Steve's grandfather. At this point this was just a likely hypothesis
Putting in a fake set of parents for Malka and Markus got Ancestry to show this relationship pathway to Mina using ThruLines
Next to see what we could find for Solotwina
JewishGen is a great resource
first the Town Finder for that community
Here is what we found for Solotwina
We knew it was in the Austro-Hungarian empire because Marcus Tieger had moved to Vienna and died in WWI for Austria,
so now it is SOLOTVYN
We found a researcher in Israel building a tree for this town at MyHeritage!
He was very helpful but we still had no proof of our theory that Malka and Marcus were siblings
screenshot of kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/Solotvyn/
The Kehila site is lovely but when I tried looking through what records I could find, there were not many online
Clustering is a powerful way to group your related matches together in a visual diagram, usually resulting in a box for each grandparent
Clustering at GEDmatch
one Jewish grandparent, and another missing from the testing community (Bavarian Catholic)
Clustering tools often create one big blob for Ashkenazi Jews - this one is from the autocluser tool from MyHeritage for Steve, it has not yet been useful
However GEDmatch Tier 1 has a new feature called AutoCluster Endogamy which looks promising
Mina and family are the green blob above
MyHeritage can be a good site for working on Jewish DNA matches
Theory of Family Relativity for Steven and Stanley
One day Steve got a match at 23andme who, along with several half siblings, were looking for their sperm donor Dad, a med student in NYC in the 70s
So the likely relationships are 2C 1/2R or 1C 2/3R or even 3rd1R if endogamy added extra cMs
Always look up the cMs shared at DNApainter for the possibilities. Subtract any segments less than 7 cM
The basic methodology for finding an unknown father is to put DNA cousins into 2 groups and find where they meet to create a son
SURPRISE: Ethan had good matches to several close DNA cousins of Steve's including, Mina, who, as you already know, is an active genealogist
Next we did some target testing
- another Eagle cousin
- another person Yoav found with the surname Tieger from Solotwina ... no luck
Ethan also tested his Y, no good matches
screenshot of kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/Solotvyn/
Genetic Genealogy is often a waiting game
A year went by with no real progress
One day I checked Steve's matches at Family Tree DNA and saw one with the surname of a late maternal TIEGER first cousin.
I sent him an email. Is your mother’s maiden name Tieger? Are you my husband’s first cousin once removed? Yes was the answer, and maybe get in touch with my dad Ed, he is the genealogist in the family.
Never underestimate a fellow genealogist. Elton's father Ed had been in touch with a Tieger side cousin who had provided him with names from a large family tree Now I had Steve's great grandparents' names and the names and descendants of their children
screenshot from descendant list view at GENI.com
Ed put me in touch with that cousin, Doug, who had hand drawn a huge tree back in the 1970s when interviewing his grandmother (upstairs) for a school anthropology project: it showed Malka and Marcus as sibs
In my conversations with Doug, he told me that his brother Ian had been a sperm donor back in NYC in the 1970s. Oh my!! Could it be this easy? But he was not a med student just a college student making extra money...
Ethan quickly sent out kits to Doug and Ian.
Meanwhile I built the tree for Ian’s other ancestors and saw many matches from his other lines to the half sibs; so I told them I was fairly certain that their bio Dad was found.
As I expected, Steve's relationship to the sperm donor Ian is 2nd cousin once removed so the siblings are his 2nd cousins twice removed
Three types of DNA tests
Y test for father's father's line
so surname
(Family Tree DNA only)
mtDNA for mother's mother's line Family Tree DNA only)
Autosomal DNA test for all your ancestors
SNP - Single Nucleotide Polymorphism
a DNA mutation where a single letter chang3s
STRs are short tandem repeats
An extra copy is made of a sequence of DNA
An extra copy is made of a sequence of DNA
An extra copy is made of a sequence of DNA
An extra copy is made of a sequence of DNA
An extra copy is made of a sequence of DNA
2 Types of Y DNA Tests
Deep ancestry - haplogroup
More recent ancestry - SURNAME
Note that Jewish surnames only came into usage in Europe from 1797-1815, depending on locale.
Y Haplogroups
Jewish Y Haplogroups: J1c3, J2a cohanim
R1a1 most Levites
E1a1 is frequent
Others: various J subgroups, T1, and E1
Sample Y DNA results at 67 markers for Steve
Not a single surname in common among these close matches
Mitochondria under a microscope
Jewish mtDNA
Near Eastern origin mtDNA Haplogroups:
K1a9 and N1b2
others are H variations, probably European
Mitochondria DNA (MtDNA) is not usually useful for genealogy although it can prove or disprove a particular matrilineal line.
Kitty's Guidelines for Jewish DNA Matches worth following up on
- At least one segment > 20 cM
- Another segment > 10 cM
- Several more good sized segments
- Sort by the largest segment at GEDmatch
Match to a maternal side Ashkenazi 3rd cousin
Comparison to a paternal side Norwegian 3rd cousin
Israel Pickholtz documents his extensive family DNA project
He blogs at allmyforeparents.blogspot.com/
About half the people who are fully European Jewish will be surprised to have parents who turn up to be distantly related
I am collecting these results for people with Ashkenazi ancestry
https://blog.kittycooper.com/2023/02/how-related-are-ashkenazim/
sorry, this slide was not in the actual presentation. it was inadvertantly left out
The reason Jewish Autosomal DNA matching is so entwined is that we are all related!
The problem with that is that many genes which predict bad health outcomes are prevalent in the AJ population
23andme still tests the most health related SNPs, the other companies test many except
Family Tree DNA which avoids them
To get the health results available in your DNA test results use this site (small fee) even with 23andme results
However if there is something serious in your DNA like a BRCA defect then talk to your doctor. My husband's oncologict used this doctor-ordered test which found his unusual BRCA2 deletion
Another thing to do with your DNA results is when you have a family health issue that is traced to a specific gene, warn the cousins that might also have that gene
I did this for my late husband's family
All my presentation slides are online at https://slides.com/kittycooper
Working with Jewish DNA 2025
By Kitty Cooper
Working with Jewish DNA 2025
Working with DNA testing presents unique challenges to the Jewish genealogical community due to the close relatedness of their DNA and the lack of deep family trees
