Sephardic Jew?

The Sizemore family has participated in DNA studies which have shown Sephardic haplotypes in several branches of the family. I will look for my file on that topic and post it here when I find it. I am a very, very distant relative of the Sizemore family.

Since when is "Shepherd" a Sephardic Jewish surname?? Can we say the same about Smith? Shepherd is a profession!

Agreed, Shmuel.

As far as the Sizemore family goes, they have the genetic haplotype in a couple of branches, but I have found no evidence of any Sizemore (by blood or marriage) who practiced that faith on the American continent.

Well I was blown away to be told by my cousin that our family was Sephardic in origin, but apparently they are. Not my Christian side (that I know of), but my supposedly Ashkenazi Jewish side :)

It was wonderful to learn because I have been in love with the Mediterranean area, Spain, Italy, and the Golden Age of Spain and the Jewish and Islamic history and culture in Spain since I was very young and knew nothing about my family.

I promised to get back to you with source for Jewish haplotypes in the Sizemore family.

Mary Sizemore
William (m. Winifred Greene, who was Jewish) passed the R1b gene to John H. Sizemore who married Mollie Gregory (who was Jewish). These Gregories moved with the Yateses, Coopers, Sheldons, and Rameys through Pittsylvania Co., and Mordecai Gregory was part of a minyan in Wayne Co., Ky. with Isaac Cooper and John Adair and others.

http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/p/a/n/Donald-N-Pantherya...
The Sizemore family was said to be an Indian family, perhaps Saponi or Mattaponi, who served in a regiment of the Royal South Carolina troops during the Revolution. The ECAs often confuse him with his son George Edward Sizemore ca. 1790 Hawkins Co., Tenn. whose family ended up in W.V. In reality, the Sizemore family was one of the first Sephardic-Jewish families to establish a foothold in the eastern Appalachians. They appear to have come to Virginia and Charleston from Barbados and London. Recent DNA analyses have confirmed that the first Sizemore male was American Indian, matching samples from Panama, Alaska and North America. In 1746 He enters 400 acres at the mouth of Polecat Creek on the South side of Banister River. In 1754 Henry Sizemore enters 400 acres between Polecat and the brances of Sandy Creek. This was in Lunenburg Co. VA. in 1746, Halifax County in 1752, in Pittsylvania Co. in 1767. He lived near the Greene Co., TN. Line.

This is not the first exceptional claim that Donald Panther Yates has made.

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2008/oct/11/dna-lab-owner-elvi...

It's not to say that it disproves this assertion, but this assertion needs more specific and scientific support than Yates' assertion alone. Where are the tests? Who were the subjects?

The Sizemore family history seems to contain some data which is blatantly false, unrelated to this. If Mr. Yates' work is legitimate, we would do well to strongly support it and clean up the other lies hanging from the tree. If it is not, it is best to quickly expose it and pursue other avenues to learn the truth about whence we came.

Since this is a public discussion, I hope you won't mind entertaining a question from the curious: why is it such a divisive topic, whether or not the Sizemore family descends from Sephardic Jews? I'm not well-studied on the various subgroups of Judaism, and being an American "mutt" it wouldn't surprise me if you told me that my own ancestors included Baptists, Catholics, Jews, etc. Is it just that Sephardic is so different from Ashkenazic, that it seems incredible?

I'm not interested in dividing anything but truth from fiction. I take no offense from the mere idea that Jews exist in Kentucky or that I may be descended from one; Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis was Louisville man, and my father's side is all Jewish. And I have so little experience with the actual practice of Judaism that I'd have to research just to rightly discern the two rites. But the tree as it stands is something from the tabloid rack: we're single-sourcing fact from a modern author who claimed publicly that DNA evidence informs his belief that Elvis is alive--and we're using random snapshots to depict people who lived before the existence of portrait photography. That's what offends me. My intelligence is insulted by what passes for historical inquiry. Just that simple.

I see.. thanks for the explanation!

Adam & Mike,
the distinction between Sephardi & Ashkenazi Jews is pretty much completely artificial, and mostly "ethnocentric" of a specific subset of European Jews. Basically the "Sephardi" label was a "political" creation meaning "not us", in a fashion typical of Europe! It covers such an extensive geographical region as to be meaningless. The differences between subgroups under this umbrella can be extreme. The differences between Jews from India, Jews from the Balkan, and Moroccan Jews, are AT LEAST at great as between any of these groups and European Jews (which itself is hardly a mono-block). Sephardi literally means "of Spain", i.e. the descendants of those expelled from Spain in 1492! But many/most European Jews are also derived from this source. On he other hand, many of the sub0groups so labeled have never been anywhere near Spain, such as the Yemenite, Persian and Indian Jews, to name a few.

American perception of Jews, and even internally, Jewish culture in America, is rather much dominated by Ashkenazi Jews (which can be a sore point). This, despite the fact that the earliest Jews in North America were mostly Sephardi, having come over with the Spaniards and Dutch.

[ My comment above was merely to criticize the comment in the profile regarding the origins of the Shepherd surname. ]

If I may intrude on this ironically very timely topic, you may be interested to read [http://www.newsweek.com/content/newsweek/2010/06/03/the-dna-of-abra... The DNA of Abraham’s Children, Newsweek 6/3/2010] re The Jewish HapMap Project currently being conducted to understand the structure of the genomes in diverse Jewish populations.

Right, what Shmuel said. My famous Eastern European ancestors who were the chief rabbis in places like Vienna, Prague, Krakow, with my branch ending up in Lithuania are actually Sephardic, having left Spain and gone to France or Italy and then migrating eastward. And of course I am very fair, so it flaunts all stereotypes to talk about me as Sephardic. Which illustrates how dumb stereotypes are.

Having worked with a Sephardi non profit (they let in Ashkenazi, you know ...) ... as I understand it, it's really a linguistic distinction.

The "of Spains" are Ladino speakers (Spanish / Hebrew mix) and the "of Austro Hungarian Empire" are Yiddish speakers (German / Hebrew mix).

Jews who stayed closer to historic Babylon (Turkey, Iran, Greece, North Africa etc.) are more properly called "Mizrahi." They are a different population as they never went to Spain to begin with ... and were Arabic speakers. However the rites / customs have more in common with Sephardi than Ashkenazi, so get lumped in together.

Worldwide these days Ashkenazi are 80% of the worldwide population but something like 92% of US Jews / 50% of Jews living in Israel.

Hatte, NY Sephardic Jews have always been the "snooty" ones here. :) :)

American Sephardi are kind of like the Mayflowers of the Jewish world. "We were here first!" :) :)

The confusing thing is that a number of prominent Sephardi families went to Europe early on and then were known as Ashkenazi. And became famous rabbis and founders of major rabbinical dynasties in Europe.

Yes, I lived in Israel for several years and am very familiar with this history, also from having been a history major and then later an Islamic history major.

I just always thought I was Ashkenazi and only found out last year that some large percent of my Jewish ancestors were Sephardic.

Mr. Hirschhorn.
If you can find another site with better references than the one I have used for the Sizemore family, please share it. I would like nothing better than to have historical accuracy in the profiles of my ancestors.

Ms. Edmonds-Zediker.
In other collaborative projects, those who include statements and claims are responsible for supporting them. In the case where a piece of information is challenged, and then remains unverified, it is subject to deletion--whether or not other information is available for inclusion.

I have asked to be able to verify the process by which Donald Neal Panther-Yates has arrived at his conclusion. I recognize that any other activities of the source may have little bearing on this specific finding but I think we should agree--the artifice of logic by which he claims that the DNA sample attributed to "Jesse" in Eliza Presley v. the Estate of Vernon Presley is a fragment of a living Elvis Aaron Presley--that seemingly spurious statement is cause enough to question the veracity and integrity of his overall work.

I therefore propose that if the specifics of his research cannot be found and verified that his claims should either be deleted from our pages or at least accorded much less weight and qualified within our pages as questionable.

I strongly object both to deleting the information and to minimizing it. Dr. Yates is a leader in his field so, like it or not, his claims have become a part of the Sizemore history. It's certainly legitimate to disagree with his conclusions, but it should be done by an evaluation of the evidence not by a collateral attack on his other projects. (Isn't that one of Aristotle's logical fallacies?)

Unless we have someone who has the time and interest to write a careful evaluation now, I suggest we should reframe the narrative so that it acknowledges Dr. Yates' work without drawing conclusions, and so that it leaves open for the future someone to come in and add the analysis.

This is no different than hundreds of other instances on Geni where there is enough ambiguity that reasonable people can differ. And, as in so many other cases, it's too early in the game to claim that all relevant information has turned up. In a collaborative environment it accomplishes nothing to demand that one's personal conclusions be presented as fact and all contrary opinions be suppressed.

Mr. Swanstrom - This is a nicely thought out and well expressed post.

Yes, Justin, an outright "refutation" of one piece of his work based on another would be a genetic fallacy. Pardon the pun.

The peacock term "a leader in his field" might be a bit much, though. That should be qualified.

Do we have a good idea how one might be determined to be of Sephardic Jewish descent outside of the context of Dr. Yates' work? In other words, what does one look for in the sample to arrive at that conclusion? And is that settled science?

Let's say "leader in his field" refers to the ethnogenesis of multi-racial communities in the southern US. Dr. Yates did much of the seminal work, and I'm not aware of any other academic currently doing serious work in that field, so I don't hesitate to accept him as "a leader". hope no one expects me to be an expert on his work just because I have some familiarity with it, and some strong personal opinions about which pieces I think are over-reaching and which I think show promise.

My impression is that the existence of multi-racial communities in the south, composed of mixed whites, blacks and Indians, is now widely accepted in academic circles. These communities began coalescing in the earliest days of the Virginia colony. There are many local names for them, of which "Melungeon", a term used in eastern Tennessee", has become the most familiar. The existence of these communities is established by hundreds of wills, deeds and tax lists. In the aggregate, the outline seems to beyond doubt, although details with respect to individuals are sometimes still arguable. The surnames used by members of these communities are well established (for example, http://www.melungeons.com/articles/melungeondnaproject.htm), but DNA tests support the documentary evidence that not all men with a particular surname belong to the same male lineage. That is, some men must have taken their mother's surname (or perhaps someone else's surname -- for reasons that can be endlessly argued).

But your question is, how can the Sephardic piece of Dr. Yates' work be verified? And, is it settled science? I'm asking that myself.

One strand of evidence (I would call it circumstantial) is that some members of some of these multi-racial families belong to J1 or J2, y-chromosome haplogroups that are common among Jews. But, I think that might be taking the evidence further than science will bear. These haplogroups are not exclusively Jewish, and J1 is much more common among the Ashkenazim than among the Sephardim. We'd have to look at the STR patterns in the individuals tested to know whether they are close relatives (say, within a few hundred years) to modern Jews. So, yes, I think this methodology can provide scientifically valid supporting evidence, but I don't know whether it does in these cases.

Another stand of evidence, is the persistence of Jewish religious practices among these families. Here, the methodology is the same as it would be for any other study of suspected crypto-Jews. (For an example of Dr. Yates' specific examples, see http://dnaconsultants.com/_blog/DNA_Consultants_Blog/post/Signs_of_...). Is it scientifically valid? I think most academics would agree it is, but it is also open to more subjectivity than I would like personally. Some of my relatives 100 years ago were "Messianic Jews" (that is, Christians who adopted many Jewish practices). Using the standard tests, they would pass for crypto-Jews -- but they weren't. They were Christians who fell in love with Judaism. So, I think there are some potential problems with looking at contemporary practices and assuming they have been there all along.

This is a rather long answer to your question. There must be people on Geni who know much more about this than I do. I'm hoping they step forward and share with the rest of us.

JC,

The DNA analysis is beyond me, but I did do a bit of a study on Melungeons, and you summarize the thinking on ""tri-racial isolate groups of the Southeastern United States" well.

One of the pieces of history often forgotten is that early Charleston, North Carolina and other Southern port cities in Colonial America were far more diverse than they later became. Trade and communication routes between Virginia and Barbardos was quite brisk, for example, and getting back to the Sephardic example is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Charleston,_Sou...

The earliest members of my Jewish family arriving to America arrived to Charleston before the Civil War. So hear hear Erica. Apropos that, I was at a party last night talking to some very southern friends and we got on the subject of Little Rock and Jewish relatives of mine from Little Rock when the woman who is about as Southern and Christian as one can be, started telling me about her Jewish relatives. Not one or two but she is descended from Southern Jews on one side.

I need to find out from my cousins when their Cajun Jewish family hit Lousiana from Alsace Lorraine. Early 1800s I *think.*

My sister's husband is from the Jews who emigrated from Alsace to Mississipi and Louisiana. I can look up when they arrived but I think it was early 19th century.

That would be very interesting as I know my white anglo saxon's tended to migrate as groups of affiliated families, but had not heard of that on my Jewish side. My Cajun cousins are Goldsteins.

Erica Howton The first birth in America was in 1847 in Rodney, MS. That is my brother-in-law's great uncle. That side was in Mississippi by that date. The ones in Louisiana I don't know as much about, but I assume that they did not reach Louisiana until the second half of the 19th century.

The Charleston relatives - mine - arrived in the 1830s and 1850s.

The Alsace family are Israels and Levys. A cousin has traced them to Alsace and knows which towns they came from.

Erica. I may be getting into this conversation very late but I wanted to agree that our family were Secret Crypto Jews. My family the Purdy's, Sigler's, Howton seem to stem from a long line of people who kept traditions in their family but on the outside due to not wanting to be persecuted in the south, claimed that they were Christian.

Why, do I say that o believe this. Many, Kentucky great grandmotuer practiced Judaism, Shabbat, Holidays, never went to church and even cooked Jewish meals. She married a man, who's family came from Alsace France named Liebers and Engel. They hid being Jewish as well. My mom's mother also was raised Jewish and married my Jewish grandfather who also hid this but due to my research found Jewish burials in Mount Sinia and United Hebrew Cemetery of St. Louis. It was a secret that when my mom or grandma asked who they were they were told, not to worry about it. My mom even remembers who grandmother being raised by another very Jewish secret family Hahn's who I think raised her from 10. On the outside they claimed, Lutheran, Catholic but u have found in my maternal mtdna matches as well as family history, the Sigler's were Jewish and even married into other Jewish families Abraham Meyer's daughter Mildred.. Also my Bryant's were Jewish and also married into Jewish families. My own Purdy's married the father of John Downing who married Sylvia Fuchs a Jewish woman from New York. I can go on.

Furthermore, there is a Jewish grave site calked Elb Cemetery where only a handful of Jews were buried in Christian County Kentucky, and I match through DNA to families that are related to these Jewish families. I also relate to Jewish Sephardic Jews who originally came to America who relate to Jews buried in Mikveh Israel. One more interesting fact in my family are the Winsteads, who all seem to have taken on very Spanish names which seems odd in Kentucky such as Denelones, Alzira, Alzaidi and other interesting names that when you type them in they come up as Spanish towns. I went on JewishGen and found almost every single person on my maternal lineage in Jewish Gen Family Trees too. Through other links such as Sigler's, I found there is a website named JewishSiglerfamily, which is about my Sigler family who immigrated to Kentucky. Namely Jacob Sigler actually put a Jewish symbol of Ba'al Teshuva on his gravestone. You can even search forums on Ancestry message boards about John Downing, Jacob Sigler, Holemans of Kentucky being Jewish and more.

Hope all this information helps confirm your suspisions and backs up facts about Jewish ancestors. Since I have put these puzzle pieces together I have found maternally I am fully Jewish and have returned. My grandma herself told my mother she is Jewish and was raised Jewish.

I also think we relate DNA wise too through the Howton line. Thank you for starting this forum snd If you have any questions on my family line and research please feel free to contact me.