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.

(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

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.’)

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!