August 2, 2016

Those members of the Italkim Project who had not previously joined this one were transferred here, with a net gain of 14 new members; the Italkim Project was closed. Members whose grandparents were not either all Italian or Jewish have their direct line Italian and/or Jewish yDNA and mtDNA results displayed on those results pages, but their autosomal results will be archived and not included in the MO analysis at this time. Those who are of all Italian or Jewish parentage will be added into the next update of the MO analysis.


July 25, 2016

Here's a breakdown of MO results for our 15 full-Jewish members.

Jewish Diaspora: 95% - 100%

Southern Europe: 5% - 12% (four members)

Asia Minor: 2% - 11% (seven members, three of whom are close relatives)

Western Europe: 6%, 1 member

Eastern Europe: 2% - 3%, 3 members

North Africa: 1% - 2%, 3 members

Eastern Middle East: 3%, 1 member

Other: Scandinavia, 3%, 8%, two members; 3% Central Asian, one member; 2% Finland, one member

  July 21, 2016 Anonymized myOrigins Data for 125 Italians

 

July 19, 2016

Dear Project Members,

To date, we have 125 members whose four grandparents are Italian and who have Family Finder/myOrigins results available for analysis; most of our Italian members are of Southern Italian origin. To date, we have 15 members whose four grandparents are Jewish and who have Family Finder/myOrigins results available for analysis.

Please note that we have not included in the data reported here the results for people of known Jewish-Italian admixture. We are concentrating on distinguishing the two communities first in order to establish base-line results for future comparisons.

The general myOrigins results for the 125 Italians are as follows.

100% have Southern European ranging from 22% to 100% (only fourmembers have 100%, and two are from the same family).

97% have Asia Minor, ranging from 8% to 53%.

70% have North African, ranging from 1% to 8%.

34% have Eastern Middle East, ranging from 2% to 20%.

25% have West Central European, ranging from 2% to 47%; two members have 34% and 47% respectively, and both of them have known Northern Italian ancestry.

Other biogeographical areas are represented from 1% to 10% including Eastern Europe (one person with 20% has known Northern Italian ancestry), Britain, East Central Africa, Finland, Scandinavia, and West Africa.

Based on these results, we can tentatively say that the base myOrigins signature for Italians is comprised of Southern European and Asia Minor, but MENA (Middle Eastern/North African) and West Central Europe are also common. Italians with higher levels of either of these regions, but with no known ancestry from them, are encouraged to investigate their family’s origins using traditional genealogical means as a complement to their DNA results.

Jewish Results

40% of the 125 full-Italian members have Jewish Diaspora results ranging from 5% to 16%; FTDNA requires a minimum of 5% to label the results as such, and lower than 5% may be labeled as Eastern European because at small amounts differentiating between these two groups can be difficult. None of these people has knowledge of Jewish ancestry apart from their DNA results.

Our Jewish members are comprised of both Ashkenazi people who have no known or suspected Sephardic admixture, and those who do. Only one has suspected Italian ancestry. Part of our ongoing analysis is to review Family Finder matches that our Jewish members and our Italian members share in common. This is quite an undertaking, but we hope that it might help to confirm Jewish origins for our Italian members, and Sephardic origins for our Jewish members. We will report more on this in a future update.

What to do next?

Our analyses continue as more members join. To our members who have not yet tested Family Finder, we encourage you to do so. Likewise, for those who have already tested Family Finder, please consider testing any other family members who fit the requirements of all four grandparents from either the Jewish or Italian community. It is possible, for example, for one sibling to show Jewish Diaspora, but for other siblings not to; this is due to the randomness of autosomal DNA recombination.

We encourage you to take advantage of the project forum to ask your questions and post your comments. We are also anticipating a myOrigins update from FTDNA which we hope will better delineate the results, especially the Southern European category.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

Vince, Josh, and Mike