Insights Into Male and Female Differences in Genealogy

 Nadene Goldfoot                                           

There are differences between the sexes.  Within males and females are chromosomes identified as the X for females and Y for males that come from our cells.  These are the male line and the female lines. We inherit 23 chromosomes from each parent and the X and Y are the last one, the 23rd.   The male inherits both the X and the Y lines but can only pass on to their children the Y line.  The female does not have the Y line, only her X line which she passes onto her children.  A common Y line for Jewish men is J1 (cohen gene) while the common Jewish line for the Jewish women seems to be K.  

                                               

This is why men are so important in  testing our DNA.  Test a man for both the X and the Y lines and you have the knowledge of his father, and all the male grandparents down the line to Adam. 

A man also has the genes of his mother and her mother, so on back to Eve.  If a woman wants information about her inheritance of genes, she should ask her brother to test, which I did.  That way we both have the information about our father and our mother.  If our father lived long enough to test, his test would show the information on his father's line and his mother's line, which is a different mother from our mother, important to us but is not our mother.  She would be our paternal grandmother.  

A female only has the X line so cannot find what the line of her father was.  Each line has a name.  For instance, the Cohens in the Jewish family are found to be the same, so are called J1.  My father's line is a Q, and further testing has labeled it as QBZ67.  A female passes on her X line to her daughters.  

  The oldest male in the family should test as their information can go back further.  They will show genes inherited that we may not receive.  That's another thing.  You and your siblings inherit some of the same genes and some different ones, too.  That's why they are not carbon copies of you.  It's great if all siblings test in a family when they can afford to do it.  You can get a broader picture of your family that way.                                     

Aunts and Uncles are important to test. Male cousins can tell you all about your mother's side of the family if you're a female.  My mother's line was Robinson.  My male 1st cousin was of immense great help in finding out what her father's line was all about. 

 My maternal uncle had an operation on his mitral valve and had to have it replaced with a pig valve, which was done during a certain period.  He was then found to have an irregular heart beat called a-fib.  I inherited this gene and also had a mitral valve problem which could be repaired, thank goodness, without the need for a new valve.  I have a-fib. I'm said to have an enlarged heart.  My father also had an enlarged heart.  We can inherit heart problems from both sides of the family.  Yikes.

This DNA tells us what groups of people were intermarrying with our family groups, and history may tell us why they came to join our settlements.  

Jews who came from Poland are very diverse genetically.  People came from many countries to Poland in medieval times, and in the 18th century migrated from Poland to other lands such as Rumania, where they found Byzantine Jews from Constantinople living there.  They also found some refugees from the Spanish Inquisition of the 15th century already living there.  There was also a Jewish migration from Lithuania into the area around Bialystock, Poland around 1495.  

Back in the 3rd and 4th centuries, Jews fleeing oppression in the Middle East, as the Temple in Jerusalem and the city were destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, fled and settled in Southern Italy from where they moved to Northern Italy and then into the Rhineland of Germany and then further east into what is the eastern part of Germany and then later into Poland.  

Ashkenazic DNA is a mosaic of the Jewish communities it has lived in and shared with others for hundreds of years, so where the point of origin is for each family is hard to tell.  Was it Western Asia, Europe or the Middle East----or all of these?    That's why scientists in genetics do studies of the male Y chromosome and why it's so important to every diverse group of people.  Jews are a good group to study because they are endogamic, that is that they have intermarried within the family ever since Abraham married his niece, Sarah.  They were from today's Iraq in a city called Ur.  The Egyptians married their sisters and brothers.  Many family groups of Muslims are also endogamic.  Jews tried to marry within their own Jewish circles, but often the men would marry someone in the land area they were in for long periods of time.  

                                                

                    Remember the Frisco Kid with Gene Wilder?

                  I guess my Nathan Goldfus/foot  was the Telsiai Kid

The early settlers of the USA had to marry people within their neighborhood considering travel then was by horse, or horse and buggy.  They didn't go very far unless they just couldn't find a mate in their circle, then had to travel further away from home.  My paternal grandparents were Nathan Goldfoot, formerly "Goldfus" of Telsiai, Lithuania,  whose line was from Germany, and Zlata "Hattie" Jermulowski/e of Lazdijai, Suwalki, Lithuania/Poland who claimed she was a Litvak (Lithuanian).  They met up in the mountains of Idaho in a mining town of Council because the train was recently laid down there.  Of course, they married; the only Jews there and that were single. He was almost 6 feet tall and she was barely taller than a midget.  She had to stand on a chair to kiss him.    Zlata was there with her half-sisters and their husbands as well.  They married in Boise, Idaho, not knowing how to read or write in English.  You should see the spelling on their marriage certificate.  Thank goodness that I could read the witnesses names better.   Nathan had traveled from Lithuania to England, Ireland, Canada, Idaho and then Oregon.                                                         

It has been said that American Jews constitute about 27 to 30% of any group whose distinguishing characteristic is intelligence.  Scientists reveal that the mean Jewish IQ is about one standard deviation above that of other Europeans.  About  27 to 30% of Ashkenazim have the mother's lines of the K haplogroup.  This may be important or not.  Our father's mother was not a K but a W, another female line, and our IQ's are very healthy.  Smart people tend to be drawn to other smart people, and so on.  It becomes something inherited.  Environment draws it out.  Give a child the proper stimulating environment and he can reach his potential. Parents rarely realize that they are the most important teachers of a new life and are laying down the thinking patterns of the children.  Of course a fantastic teacher can do a lot to develop that capability, harumph, hmm!!! Or Squash it!!!!

 Resource:

Tracing Your Jewish DNA For Family History & Ancestry by Anne Hart, 2003, 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frisco_Kid