Tag Archives: Crypto Jews

Asia, Black Sea Germans, genealogy, Germany, Greece

I Wanna Believe!

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40 plus degrees in Athens, 2010. Do I look as if I belong? On the same trip, in Plomari, Lesvos, Greece, an old Romani woman tried to sell me some lace. I turned her away. Little did I know she might have been a relation. Now, I wish I had bought the lace.

The Truth is Out There. Or Is It?

A short time ago, I wrote a story here about my unknown bio-father’s origins or, at least, his possible origins. He was probably half Black Sea German and Half Pontic Greek. That was my best guess, anyway. My paternal grandparents were likely a mixed German and Pontic Greek couple, I thought, maybe from Odessa, maybe from the Crimea, maybe from Dobrudja in Romania. (Yes, I had done my homework.)1

I was leaning heavily on Ancestry’s ethnicity estimate for this highly unscientific theory – my latest ethnicity estimate says that my DNA signature is 12 plus percent Germanic and 18 percent Anatolia and the Caucasus. Then I have bits and pieces of other places from Denmark (6%) to Mongolia. I get no journeys for the paternal side.

To put this into perspective, I use my mother’s ethnicity estimate. She is a dyed-in-the-wool (sic) back-to-the-boat French Canadian. Ancestry gives her side 37 percent Quebec, 3 percent France, 2 percent Norway, 6 percent Cornwall (Brittany?) 2 percent Northwestern Europe/Southeastern England, and a touch of Indigenous. My one journey is spot on, a swatch of land north of Montreal, the Lachenaie Seigneury.

I have 25, 000 cousin matches on my mother’s side, the closest being related to my mother’s grandmother, Melina Gagnon, at 200 centimorgans.

I have a mere 2,000 matches on the paternal side. Only a handful are ‘closer’ cousins, 30-60 centimorgans. These closer matches live in Turkiye and have Turkish names or live in Germany and have German names. To muddle things up, quite a few of my Turk matches now live in Germany.

Some of my German matches have extensive trees, many that lead to 1860 Besserabia, specifically the Odessa Region, more specifically Hoffungstal and Kassel villages. These are classic Black Sea Germans. One triangulated group with a common ancestor is from Galicia, near L’viv.

None of my Turkish matches have good family trees, but almost all (with one notable exception, my closest match at 3rd cousin)5 have the Pontic Greek journey. I reached out to some of them and they seem very confused about their ‘Greek’ heritage.

This is the sum total of my evidence. It’s all I have to go on. Hence, my half-and-half theory. It makes good sense, I think, until you factor in all of those pesky Romani Gypsies.

Those Mysterious Gypsies

Yes, I have many, many Romani cousin matches, all distant, 15-30 centimorgans. Indeed, the vast majority of my paternal cousins are from the ‘Traveller’ community.

These Romani hail from virtually every corner of Europe.

Yet, my ethnicity estimate on Ancestry gives me only one or two percent Romani – and that took years to show up. Why so many Romani matches with so little Romani DNA?”6

Call Mulder and Scully?

From the very beginning in 2017, I perceived something bizarre on My Heritage. I had a large group of matches, many closely related to each other, all sharing a slim slice of chromosome 17 with me. And, weirdly, these matches lived all over the place in Romania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Albania, North Macedonia, Cyprus, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Turkiye, Greece, Finland, Sweden, Poland, Ukraine, Austria, Switzerland, the UK and, yes, Germany.

I was flummoxed. I created a database to make sense of these crazy matches. I joked to my son, “I need to call in Mulder and Scully because the truth is out there and it’s likely very strange.”

But, then, in 2018 Ancestry updated its ethnicity estimate to give me that bit of Romani DNA. Eureka! And, get this, they gave me the Romani journey, too, the only journey on my bio-father’s side. (Alas, they have since removed it.)

Genealogical Mish-mash

Soon after, My Heritage added their ‘communities’ function based on tree evidence and I could see that these chromosome 17 ‘aliens’ were branches of a Romani Gypsy community reaching from Russia to the UK, with the bulk derived from ‘Vojvodina Serbia/Hungary’ as well as ‘Greece/Turkiye/North Macedonia/ and Albania. 2

I looked up Vojvodina. Four subgroups of Romani live in Serbia, apparently: a Romanian or ‘Wallachian’ one; a “white” or Hungarian one; a Bosnian one; and a Turkish one. That didn’t help.

It was a mind-boggling genealogical mish-mash.

It Wasn’t About the Bomb

I’m no scientist, obviously, despite that early effort with a database. When in the mood, I turn to colourful doodles – and meditation – to open my mind to the elusive TRUTH.

Over the years I’ve filled many notebooks with genealogy doodles, trying to open my mind. Years ago, apparently, I wrote “Gypsies are Key.”

(No luck yet.)

Still, it is clear I am not the product of some kind of alien intervention, or genetic remodelling caused by the massive thermo-nuclear bomb the Americans set off at the Bikini Atoll in March, 1954, when I was conceived. The fallout reached Quebec, apparently. (Wouldn’t that make a good plot for the new X-Files show?)

The truth of my origins is much more down-to-earth. I am a (very small?) part of an ancient and storied community, one that has long been misunderstood and much maligned. Even the word Gypsy has pejorative undertones. They were called Gypsies because it was believed they came out of Egypt when they actually came of out India.

The Problem with the Half-and Half Theory

In those early days, eight long years ago, on My Heritage I had around 40 Romani matches. Today, I have hundreds and hundreds on both the Ancestry and My Heritage platforms, some 50-100 percent Romani, others with lesser amounts. Every day, I get a couple of new Gypsy-related matches, attached to Europeans and Anatolians. (Today’s match, for instance, gets 11% Romani and 75% Ukrainian.) These days, it seems, these Chromosome 17 Romani are essentially the ONLY matches I get on my bio father’s side.5

Here’s my problem: If my bio-father’s Turkish side has chromosome 17 Romani (Albanian names like Gashi and Krasniqi and Berisaj prevail) and his Germanic side has chromosome 17 Romani (often Hungarians with Horvath, Varga, Toth surnames) and these people are all related, how can my bio-dad be ‘half-and-half,’ say with a mom attached to Baden-Wurrtemberg and a dad to Trabzon?

Maybe my bio father was some kind of mish-mash himself and not strictly half Germanic and half Pontic Greek. Maybe the bit of Romani ancestry I have is key to knowing from whence this man came, as I mused on paper many moons ago.

Whatever, I have to assume that the online algorithms (iffy embryonic science or mere infotainment to begin with) are missing something essential…

The Discovery

As it happens I may have discovered a possible explanation for my bio-father’s wacky heritage. It involves an intriguing new theory – not mine.

A while back I got a ‘Romani’ match on My Heritage who had a huge hidden tree (very unusual) and who also matched with me on two chromosomes, 17 as well as 9 (not unusual.)

I messaged the man and he replied that he is a genetic genealogist managing the profiles of a large group of Gypsies from all over the place. (But, I already knew all about that.)

Months later, I contacted the scientist again because, frankly, I had no other avenue to explore with respect to my unknown bio-father.

This time the man, Dr. Douglas Schar, pointed me to his website.

I learned he is a trained scientist (PhD in Botany) of German/Swiss Jewish and Romani extraction. His current area of exploration is Crypto-Jewry and, right now, he is tracing a huge group of Romani people (my group, his group) that he postulates is made up of Crypto Jews.

Gypsy/Jewish Woman?

Now, I can’t pretend to understand the science behind this man’s work but, if I understand his blog posts, he suspects this particular group of Romani (not necessarily ALL Romani) are descended from Yemeni Jews who went to India and then joined a group of Jewish traders, the Rhadanites, on the Silk Road.

This theory is a work in progress, he told me by email. More and more ‘pure’ Romani (members of the Traveller community from all over Europe) are being added to the online databases every day – and finding Jewish heritage. This scientist does not think he is revising the old Out-of- India theory; he says he is just ‘filling in the blanks.’

Yes, he postulates on his blog, the Romani Gypsies came out of India but they were Jewish Indians. They followed the Silk Road, back and forth, from Asia to England, mixing with both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews along the way.3

YourDNAPORTAL OUT OF INDIA Lakania map for my genes. This map sure makes the Silk Road Theory look good.

I Still Wanna Believe

I admit, I like the theory: MDLP algorithm gives me high levels of Romanian Jew and Uzbek Jew. And I get big time Iraqi Jew and Yemeni Jew on the Ancient Near East Algorithm. (Dr. Schar is using the Dodecad algorithm on Gedmatch so as ‘to compare apples and apples.’)

MDLP 22. I suspect the bio-guy was a Ukrainian or Greek, not from any online info, but from my family situation in 1954.

Could this genetic genealogist’s theory explain my unknown bio-father’s wonky, opaque ancestry that perplexes all the online algorithms?

Could it be, that from this perspective, I am much more than one measly percent Romani Gypsy, even if my bio father, whoever he was back in 1954 Montreal, identified as Ukrainian, or German, or Swiss, or Greek or Hungarian or Romanian Jew, or English or French Canadian or WHATEVER. Could it be that, on my bio-father’s side, I derive from a group of people as yet not widely understood?

Good grief. I doubt I will ever know the Truth, even if it is ‘out there’ and, perhaps, not so otherworldly at all.

END

Dr. Schar’s website:

https://gypsyandjewish.com

Dr. Schar’s papers are available on Academia.edu

  1. I did enough research to start on three fictional origin stories about a meet up between a Pontic Greek and a German: Reading Ovid in Dobrudja, Reading Gogol in Odessa and Reading Euripides in Crimea. Each of those authors, all favorites of mine in college by happenstance, have ties with those specific countries.
  2. Two surnames comes up in more than one Romani tree: Gashi and Krasniqi, both the names of Albanian tribes. The Gashi tribe went to Serbia and North Macedonia, which fits. Mustafa too is a common surname. Other Romani communities my matches have include “Serbia/Germany/ Turkiye/France” and “Serbia/Bosnia/Bulgaria/Romania” and “Romani in Russia/Germany/Poland/Czech/Latvia/Lithuania.” See, a real mish-mash.
  3. To further amend the “Out of India” narrative, Dr. Schar says he also believes “this migration was not just east to west, rather that people went east to west and west to east several times in a lifetime. They were most likely traders who travelled the Silk Road, to and fro. “
  4. The other day I watched a show on YouTube about the Middle Ages Guilds in England and learned the top two guilds, in wealth, were textile and spices. (Silk Road items for the wealthiest in England.)
  5. My closest Turkish match on Ancestry (whom I presumed was Pontic Greek) also has 1 percent Romani on her Ancestry ethnicity estimate. (We share 60 centimorgans or third cousin.)Unlike me, she still gets the Romani journey along with the Slovak/Hungary Border journey. (The two appear to go together here.) Oddly, she does not get the Pontic Greek journey. How can that be? (I messaged the lady immediately. She seemed totally perplexed about her Anatolian, Greek Islands, Romanian, Ukrainian, Romani ethnicity results. Soon, she went radio silent on me. That always happens with my Turkish matches, friendly at first until they realize they are not what they think they are.) I have related matches on Tinos in the Cyclades and some platforms give me Andros Island next door. Very specific!
  6. Endogamy is the logical answer. The Romani community is highly endogamous so a 25 centimorgan match ( or even a thousand plus 25 centimorgan matches on the same chromosome) might not mean anything much. In fact, you can say the same for my French Canadian ancestors :)Unless there’s a tree match don’t trust the centimorgan count.

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View of the waterfront square from a small resto around the corner from my older brother’s holiday home in Plomari, Lesvos, Greece. Delicious Dolmades. Best I’ve ever had – and I worked in Park Extension, Montreal in the 1980’s. Displaced Greeks from Pontus, Turkiye were sent to Lesvos in 1923. I recall an old Romani woman pestered me at a resto to buy her lace. I declined. She mumbled something that I took to be unpleasant. I thought, “Don’t be mean. I’m as witchy as you are.” Little did I know she may have been a distant cousin. I now wish I had bought the lace!

Filles de Roi, genealogy, Quebec

My French Connection -or why my grandfather had a lot of GAUL

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My very Gallic Grandpapa, Jules Crepeau (1879-1938) proud descendant of the Redones of Eastern Brittany in the Iron Age, among other Gallic Tribes.

Judging from her family tree, my late mother, Marie Marthe Crepeau was a bona fide French Canadian de souche.1

Her father, Jules Crepeau, son of an entrepreneur painter from Laval and her mother, Maria Roy of Montreal, daughter of a master-butcher, have trees that go right back to the boat in France – and yes, mostly to Normandy, Poitou and Ile de France. Classic!2

And yet, according to Ancestry’s (beta) chromosome browser, my mother was not 100 percent “French.”

I’ve provided my own spit to the platform and apparently chromosomes 3 and 12 on her side are English (but that does include the North of France) and chromosomes 17 and 18 are Norwegian (Norsemen -Northmen-Normandy, perhaps?) And a swath of chromosome 2 is indigenous American, making me less than one percent indigenous.

Lately, I’ve subscribed to an interesting infotainment3 website that really dives into a person’s ethnicity from all angles and over a slew of time periods: Ancient, Bronze , Iron and Modern Ages. Sure, I get Eure, Finistere and Vendee (Normandy, Brittany and Poitou) in spades, but I get just about every other area of France, too – as well as some Spanish, French Corsican and French Basque.4

My mom’s French Canadian family tree supports some of this. From the ten percent sample I traced back to France I get natives of Limousine, Aquitaine, the Mid-Pyrenees, Picardy, Bourgogne, Haute-Marne, Bayonne, Les Rhones Alpes, as well as the Canadian North (Innu).5

And let’s not forget my ancestor the legendary pioneer river pilot Abraham Martin dit L’Ecossais (he of the Plains of Abraham fame) who may have been from Scotland. My mom has him at least twice in her tree.

A while back, I figured out that my Mom’s paternal Crepeau line (father’s father’s father, etc.) can be traced back to Vendee but it is likely of Sephardic Jewish ethnicity and hails originally from Spain. 6

Lachenaye Seigneury 1676 (Claude Martel -historian)
View from Hubou farm (or close). These pioneer farms on the North Shore of Montreal were a narrow stretch of river away from the Eastern tip of Laval Island, and just a bit more north of the Eastern tip (Pointe aux Trembles) of Montreal Island.

In New France, my grandpapa Crepeau’s maternal tree can be traced to the original families at the Lachenaye (Terrebonne) Seigneury (est.1673) north east of Montreal, four founding farmer families in particular: Ethier (Poitou-Charentes), Forget (Normandy), Hubou (Ile de France) and Limoges (Rhones Alpes). My mother’s DNA is largely a mish-mash of these families’ genes, for they inter-bred down through the centuries. Basil Crepeau my mom’s 4 x GG was a slightly later arrival at Lachenaye who moved in beside the Hubous.

Jules and family before my mom was born circa 1920. Maria Roy (Gagnon) his wife was also connected to the Lachenaye tribe through Ethier.

Now DNA distributes down the generations in very complicated and irregular ways especially where endogamy or founder effect is concerned8 and judging from my many French Canadian ‘cousins’ on Ancestry, my mom may have gotten a disproportionate amount of her genetic material from the Hubou founder family at Lachenaye Seigneury. A great majority of my DNA cousins on that platform are connected to me through her 2nd great grandfather, Michel Hubou dit Tourville.9

As it happens, Michel’s pioneer ancestor was one Mathieu Hubou dit Deslongchamps, a master-armourer from Normandy who was married to one Suzanne Betfer who was…wait for it… a gal from Gloucester, UK.

Now, ain’t that fun! A bona fide English Fille de Roi!!

THE END

1. de souche a controversial label that means from the roots.

2. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.20.500680v1.full.pdf On the genes, genealogy and geographies of Quebec. According to: French Canadians come from 8500 founder families in 17th and 18th century, with only 250 of these founder families, the majority from Perche, leaving behind the majority of genetic disorders that passed down through the ages. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41464974

(Hereditary disorders in the population of Quebec II Contribution of Perche)

The very first pioneers, the 2,700 super founder families, 1608-1680, were 95 percent French. The later 17th and 18th century founder families were 80-85 percent French but the non-French includes Acadians.) The first 2,700 founder families contributed to 2/3rds of the modern gene pool of French Canadians, but geography and natural boundaries kept families within even smaller gene pools. Indigenous DNA contributed one percent of French Canadian DNA. Regions can have super-founder families that contributed even more to the modern gene pool.

3. Your DNA Portal

4.These ethnicity estimates are based on complex science but the various results have to be taken with a grain of salt. Even if the original science is spot on, these results depend on what sample of your DNA is taken and how far back the algorithm is examining. I liken it to making a complicated stew from various ingredients, letting it simmer for a long time and then trying to deconstruct what it was made from. Maybe you put parsnips, carrots and parsley in the recipe, but these ingredients are already related genetically so it’s not easy to pull apart. Still, taken as a whole the results I get are telling: My mother’s ancestors were mostly from Gaul, especially the tribes Redones and Veneti in Brittany. Hardly a surprise as that’s what my Mom had always been told, that her people were from Brittany. I also get Gaul Santones who lived in Charentes. So spot on!

5. Nos Origines and Drouin

6.My mother is no outlier French Canadian in this respect, at least according to a recent paper that maintains that the Huguenot and Acadian populations are largely made-up of Sephardic Jews escaping the Inquisition. Investigating the Sephardic Jewish ancestry of colonial French Canadians through genetic and historical evidence. Hirschman.

https://nameyourroots.com/home/names/Crespo (Spanish roots likely Sephardic) The name means Curly Haired One. My mom knew that. She did have very curly hair as did her father so that trait passed down through the ages.

The Crepeaus (Crespeaus, Crespo’s Crepspin) are not the only possible Spanish line my mother has in her tree. For instance, her mother’s maternal Gagnon line goes back to one Lily Rodrigue in Normandy, a surname some say is Spanish derived. Another line goes to a Domingo in Bayonne, near the Spanish border. That name is Spanish/Italian and found in Southern France. I also have Navarre or Navarro. ADDED August 2025. I recently got two distant cousins – not related themselves on Ancestry Crespo and Crespim. Both mostly Spanish (very little 2 percent French) with 3 percent Sephardic Jew. Seems to prove my point.

7. Roy is the second most common surname in Quebec. http://leroy-quebec.weebly.com/the-surname-leroy.html . Gagnon is the third most common name and my direct pioneering ancestor hails from Perche in the North of France where he was a leading citizen, apparently.

8. Supposedly, all things being equal, we have only a 47 percent chance of inheriting DNA from an 8th GG, and inherited DNA from 8th GG’s amounts to a fraction of 1 percent but a high degree of endogamy or ‘founder effect’ clearly changes that, judging from the info in the studies in the links I have posted here.

9. On Ancestry, 60 percent of my closer DNA cousins are connected to me through Michel Hubou Tourville and his wife, but it should be noted that a full 400 family trees on Ancestry contain his name. It appears that his descendants moved to the US and did their family trees! Also, these ‘cousins’ tend to have my other Lachenaye names like Ethier and Forget and Limoges in their trees, so impossible to parse.

“This article explains the very thing I’m talking about: https://www.legacytree.com/blog/dealing-endogamy-part-exploring-amounts-shared-dna?fbclid=IwAR1veE4wNTc9gLGtx33Z8qphXmRdtTH2fREANxrenVDgx2NRqs1SznCAV0 “In one of our research cases, we found that an individual descended 12 different times from the same ancestral couple who lived in the late 1600s in French Canada. Although they were quite distant ancestors in every case (within the range of 9th-11th great grandparents), he had inherited a disproportionate amount of DNA from them due to their heavy representation within his family tree.”

Endogamy or consanguity? I’ve discovered that my grandfather Jules Crepeau likely had some double first cousins: his mother Vitaline Forget Despaties married Joseph Crepeau and Vitaline’s brother Adolphe Forget Despatie married Joseph’s sister, Alphonsine. I wonder if this happened further up the line. Wouldn’t that have messed with the DNA estimates! If such cousins marry it is closer to consanguinity than endogamy.

https://www.historyfiles.co.uk/KingListsEurope/BarbarianRedones.htm

The Celtic Tribes in France were described by the Romans as the GAULS.