Rachel Unkefer

This paper presents new Y-DNA evidence to contradict the narrative that a cluster of Ashkenazi Jewish men belonging to the I-P37 haplogroup was of somewhat recent Cossack paternity (perhaps in the 17th century). NGS testing has shown that these men shared a common Jewish male ancestor around 1,000 years ago, prior to any historical mention of the C...

Twenty years ago, a haplogroup estimate of R-M343 or R-M269 was assumed to be a marker of non-Jewish paternal ancestry. With new scienti c tools, we now know that, instead, it might indicate descendance from any number of known Jewish lineages, small and large, with probable ancient origins in the Middle East, western Asia, Africa, or the Mediterra...

Most genealogists researching their Ashkenazi families encounter brick walls in the paper trail within the past 200 years. A new research strategy using Y-DNA Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) allows us to go back further in time and, in some cases, discover a history different from the expected one. Using results from FamilyTreeDNA’s “Big Y” test,...

Way back when, starting out as genealogists researching Jewish ancestry, we probably all had the experience at least once of being chastened by a more seasoned researcher when we asked if our ancestor from, say, Poland could be related to his or her ancestor with the same surname from, say, the west bank of the Rhine. Surnames, we were told, came w...