ancestry

As I’ve often noted, it’s been a regular experience for me, over the decades, to have to tell people that I’m not Jewish. My surname is common among Jews (though it’s not exclusively Jewish), people say I look Jewish, and, as the political scientist Alan Wolfe once told me, “You sure talk like a Jew.” My paternal grandfather’s name was Elisha Jacobs, for heaven’s sake.

One I was speaking to a group of rabbis — it’s a long story — all of whom figured I had to be One of Them, and I explained things. I also commented that my explanation tends to be greeted with suspicion: people just think I’m a self-hating Jew. Said one of the rabbis: “There’s some other kind?”

These exchanges happened so frequently that, while I’m not really interested in genealogy, I couldn’t help wondering whether I might be Jewish after all, whether somewhere a few generations back my ancestors were the American South equivalent of conversos. So it was probably inevitable that I would at some point start fooling around on family-genealogy sites and, when the option became available, submit my saliva to a DNA-testing service.

Of course, neither of those options is highly reliable. So I tried two DNA-testing services and explored several genealogy sites, and got essentially the same answers. That doesn’t mean that the answers are right, of course; but the account is plausible and not without evidence.

Basically, I’m English. Very English. Two-thirds to three-quarters English, with the rest being Irish and a bit of French. No measurable Jewishness. Now, the genealogy sites get far less reliable as you go further back, but for what it’s worth, they suggest that the French elements of my ancestry come in around the time of the Norman Conquest — after that it’s England and Ireland all the way. The names are Harrison, Brown, Browning, Woodruff, Hale, Hill, Comer, … and, um, Jacobs.

And they also suggest that most of my ancestors come from the same general part of England: the West Midlands and nearby counties. Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Bedfordshire, Leicestershire, Berkshire. A small handful from Devon and Somerset. My people are from Mercia and Wessex — the realm of Alfred the Great!

Perhaps this accounts for my strong attraction to authors from the same region: Shakespeare of course, but more important to me Tolkien, George Eliot, the Gawain poet. Those are the writers who make my chromosomes tingle.

Well, it’s fun to think so.

One other thing, from the part of the story that’s better-attested: My oldest American ancestors are all from Virginia. Then they start moving down the coast, to the Carolinas and then Georgia; a few to Tennessee. Only in the past hundred years do they come to Alabama. And there’s not one Yankee among them: I appear to have no American ancestors from above the Mason-Dixon line. When I went to grad school at UVA I was returning to my roots — some of my (probable) ancestors were actually from Albemarle County — but when I moved to Illinois and then to Texas I betrayed my people. I shall weep for this.