The Lydia Conundrum

Lydia

Lydia and Inna are second cousins of mine on my mother's mother's side. They are first cousins to one another. Their grandmother, Alta Rosenbloom Kaplan, is the older sister of my grandmother Sarah Rosenbloom Gordon, who remained in Russia when her sisters and brother went to the US before the First World War.

Lydia's DNA results came in two months ago and Inna's this week.

We now have autosomal DNA from thirteen Rosenbloom second cousins: Lydia and Inna from Aunt Alta, Beverly, Beth and Sam from Uncle Hymen and my first cousins Kay and Leonard, my four sisters,  my brother and me from my grandmother Sarah.

I hope to take DNA from two more of Alta's granddaughters when I visit Moscow next month.

Two of Lydia's matches with the second cousins are over 420 cM. Eight more are between 342 and 387 cM. One is 286 cM. Compare these to the ISOGG definition of second cousins - 212.5 cM - and Blaine Bettinger's Shared cM Project's average of 238 cM and we see that Lydia's matches are much higher than expected. If it were just the vagaries of DNA, some would be higher and some would be lower, but that is clearly not the case here.

So the answer must be Jewish endogamy. All Jews, being related multiple ways, have much larger matches than the general population.

Inna with her daughter, granddaughter and a visiting Israeli cousin

Inna's results are less striking. She has over 300 cM with only three of the eleven second cousins, the highest being Leonard with 386 cM. She has six more between 258 and 296 cM. Then me at 224 cM and my brother Dan at 215 cM.

This appears to be a much more normal distribution, with less influence from Jewish endogamy.

With that, Inna has between three and six matches of over 20 cM, on eight segments with the second cousin group, including matching segments of over 50 cM.

It follows that one of Lydia and Inna, daughters of brothers, has a much greater influence from endogamy than the other. And if I were to tell you that one of them has a non-Jewish mother, hence much less endogamy, you would say that it must be Inna.

You would be wrong. As I was.

Inna's mother is from a normative Ashkenazi Jewish family. FTDNA's MyOrigins calls her 93% Ashkenazi Jewish, typical of our family. There should be lots of endogamy here.

Lydia's MyOrigins shows her to be 45% Ashkenazi Jewish and 46% East Europe non-Jewish, plus some fragments. The normal sort of background endogamy is missing, so I fully expected that Lydia's large matches with us were a result of a close cousin relationship between her Rosenbloom grandmother and her Kaplan grandfather.

If that were indeed the case, Inna's matches would be even larger because she has both the supposed cousin grandparents and the standard, garden-variety Jewish endogamy. But she doesn't. So she doesn't.

Why? Beats me! More important, why does Lydia have these big numbers? What else is going on here? It looks much too large and much too skewed to be "the strange ways of DNA." (Lydia's best match with the cousins is with Kay, whose faher also has no Jewish DNA.)

I cannot wait to see what the Moscow cousins have. One of them is Inna's sister, the other a first cousin to Inna and Lydia. So unless anyone has some suggestions, I expect to revisit this at the end of August.

Housekeeping notes
I'll be speaking on the Hebrew version of
Lessons in Jewish DNA – One Man’s Successes and What He Learned On the Journey
on 19 June at 6:30, for IGS Rishon Lezion, Museum of Rishon Lezion, Ahad Ha’am 2.

Also, my son in Chicago is making his next bar mitzvah the first Sunday in May. If any program directors are looking for something around then, please drop me a note.

Six Siblings - Part Four: Origins Revisited

Nine weeks ago, aftter we received my late brother's Family Finder results, I began a series called "Six Siblings." Part One was about FTDNA's "ancientOrigins" and "my Origins," neither of which I put much stock in. Parts Two and Three followed and dealt with comparisons among the siblings' matches. I intended Part Four to be about our second cousins and our matches with them, but we have a second cousin in a new line whose test results keep being postponed, so I have busied myself with other things.

In the meantime, FTDNA came out with a new version of myOrigins. An Enhanced Version. In their words:

This simple tool delivers both new and newly refined reference populations, including smaller trace-percentage results previously not available. These latest additions to our populations and the refinement of existing clusters ​provide a deeper look into your family history and what makes you…YOU.

The original myOrigins results for the six siblings, in birth order

Now the first thing everyone does is to look to see what has changed since the earlier version, both in the product and in our own results. If we happened to have saved our results. I wouldn't have saved mine, but as it happened I had just blogged about it in Six Siblings, so I had our results, though not those of other project members.

(Let me remind my readers that I do not take this analysis seriously and certainly do not give much credence to the precision, but as they say, it's for entertainment purposes.)

So what has changed? Well, here is how the results look. Mine, for instance. Can you spell B-O-R-I-N-G? It shows 91% Ashkenazi Jewish, 8% Asia Minor and <2% North African.

So 1% migrated from Western/Central Europe to Ashkenazi Jewish. No other changes.

Blue stars indicate changes

But it is not quite so. Genetic genealogist Diahan Southard posted a chart explaining the differences in terminology and I shall assume she writes with authority.

I had been assuming that my Eastern Middle East and North Africa were an expression of the Sephardic Jewish Diaspora

"Not so" says Diahan's chart. What was previously Ashkenazi Diaspora was actually both Ashkenazi and Sephardic. (Why FTDNA spells only one has a "c" at the end? Who knows!) In any case, they think my 91% is all Ashkenazic and the Turkey-Azerbaijan and North Africa are meant to be just that.

FTDNA explains what the two Jewish groups are, but does not explain why they had previously been grouped together under the heading "Ashkenazi."

So here are the results for the six siblings, again omitting those categories where we have no representation at all. (We appear in birth order.)

• Each of us is 91-99% Ashkenazi and within 1% of the old version results.
• The average of our Ashkenazi results went up from 94% to 95%.
• None of us any Sephardic, as defined by FTDNA.
• Other than Amy and Sarajoy, the total of out Ashkenazi and Asia Minor is at least 99%.
• Judith, Amy and I had our Eastern ME changed to Asia Minor. Sarajoy did not.
• A lot more tiny fragments which are really just for entertainment.

In short, BORING!

For comparison, I looked at the myOrigins for our two closest relatives, my father's sister and brother. Aunt Betty is 99% Ashkenazi and Uncle Bob is 97%, with a few fragments which are not attributed to Asia Minor.

I was not going to write about this at all, but it has been the subject of a lot of talk on genetic genealogy social media. Besides, there have been two other new developments that I have found even less interesting. (Not to disparage other population groups who may have results of significance.

One is the new MtDNA analysis. The company writes

We’re excited to announce the release of mtDNA Build 17, the most up-to-date scientific understanding of the human genome, haplogroups and branches of the mitochondrial DNA haplotree.

As a result of these updates and enhancements—the most advanced available for tracing your direct maternal lineage—some customers may see a change to their existing mtDNA haplogroup. This simply means that in applying the latest research, we are able to further refine your mtDNA haplogroup designation, giving you even more anthropological insight into your maternal genetic ancestry.

My MtDNA has nothing new.

The other is the Ancestry Genetic Communities which they describe as follows:
This new advancement is only possible through the millions of AncestryDNA members around the world who have chosen to participate in the Research Project as well as the massive collection of family trees, only available on Ancestry. The science behind this feature was recently published in one of the prominent scientific journals Nature Communications...
At launch there will be over 300 Genetic Communities all around the world to go and explore, with many more on the horizon. We will compare you to all of them and list the ones you have a connection to based on your DNA. These Genetic Communities dot the globe and are often more specific than what’s possible to discover with an ethnicity estimate, providing a more recent connection to your past.

What they told me? This.
Exactly what I expected? By no means. But interesting? No. About what I would expect from someone who is 91% Ashkenazi.

Housekeeping notes
Actually, as far as housekeeping goes, pre-Passover is nearly complete. Cooking and such remains to be done before the seder Monday evening. (Remember, we have only one here in Israel.)

My pre-holiday letters to the Hebrew-speaking Pikholz descendants have been mailed. The email summaries and holiday greetings will probably go out today (Sunday).

The rabbis of old tell us that just as Nisan was the month of geulah (redemption) from Egypt, so we expect it to be the month of geulah in our own day. Faster please.