DNA and self discovery by Linda Koplovitz

I have always been interested in my family's roots. I knew that we were


Russian Jews on all sides of the family. My mother's family Broudy / Cohen came from somewhere near Lithuwania and my father's family Finkel from Kieshniev. But because the people who worked at Ellis Island, could not pronounce the family names, many of the names have been changed and untraceable. My family came to America in the very late 19th century to the early 20th century.

My father had a very rosey pale complexion with brown hair and brown eyes. My mother looked Mediterranean, and looked Italian with dark hair and dark eyes. When my mother was a young woman many compared her to










Dorothy Lamour from the Road Pictures of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.


I favored my dad, turning out with very pale complexion, light brown hair, with blonde streaks in the summer, and blue eyes coming from Grandmother, Sarah from my mother's side and Grandmother Fanny from my father's side, who both had blue eyes.

My cousin Carolyn, (Cookie for short) sent me an e-mail, which contained information from the National Geographic Website about a Genome Project, which traces family DNA. I thought that this was very interesting and immediately went on the website. I ordered a DNA sampling kit, which only cost me about $100. The kit consisted of instructions with an ID number, a glass tube and a swab. I was to take a scraping of the inside of my mouth and put the swab into the glass tube container and send it back. In a few weeks I could go on-line to the National Geographic Website and plug in my ID number and get the results of where my family came from and migrated to.


This was very exciting. So in about 4 - 6 weeks, I went on-line and plugged in my number and printed all the information that had been listed.








Since my printed map and information said that I was from Africa and that I was still in Africa and never migrated out, I shoved the information in a drawer, embarrassed that I was taken for a ride. I knew that this wasn't my DNA results because I was white and Jewish and if I started in Africa, then surely I would have left by now.


About a year later, my husband and I were watching Public Television together, when a program came on about Spencer Wells and the Genome Project through the National Geographic Organization. As we were watching, my husband says to me, "Didn't you participate in this study? I'd like to see your results." Well I laughed and said, "Sure you can see the results, but the results can't be right because the results say I'm 'Black.' "


Well my husband, who is a scientist, takes my results and becomes obsessed. He buries himself in research to determine how this could be. He figures that only 1% of the entire Jewish Population have my DNA. He lets his imagination carry him away, thinking that I must be related to Moses' Ethiopian Wife or the Queen of Sheba. He starts treating me like I'm royalty. I become the center of attention and he starts telling everyone his discovery. This is very exciting and affects my daughter also, since this Mitochondrial DNA is handed down from Mother to Daughter.


In my name my husband joins geneology groups for me and I start getting e-mails from Women who are Caucasion, Jews, such as myself, who have the same DNA as I do and are wondering why our DNA results from the National Geographic Genome Project say we are all Black. Then I start getting e-mails from Black Women too. We are all DNA cousins and start calling ourselves such.

One of the women in the geneology group starts doing her own historical research and a few theories develop.

One theory is that during the Spanish Inquisition, Jews escaped Spain to an Island off the coast of Africa, which was also used as a location to transport slaves from Africa to the Americas. There a Fulani woman,

fell in love with a Jewish man

and went with him as he migrated through Africa, northeast through the Mid-East to eventually end up in Eastern Europe. She must have had a genetic mutation, since everytime her offspring would marry a man who carried the blue-eyed gene, her children had green or blue eyes. I would be the decendent of this Fulani woman.

If this theory is correct, I am so proud to have such a rich history. I wish I could have shared the news with my parents, that underneath this white complexion and blue eyes, I'm black and I came from Africa. My parents had passed away a few years ago but if they had been alive today, surely this news would have killed them.