My answer to the question: “Does my Rh negative blood come from my Native American ancestors?”

4 Comments

1. Mauricio February 14, 2022 Reply

   👍

2. Jean February 14, 2022 Reply

   I’m Rh- as is my son. I live in the US but my family on my mother’s side were Portuguese from the Azores and on my father’s side they were Polish from south central Poland (in and around the Carpathian mountains, a region that also had a good many Jews).

   I’ve read quit a bit of Native American history and recently history of Sephardic Jews (originally mostly from the Iberian peninsula)…. and both peoples have very complicated histories with a lot of migration and at times enough bigotry towards them that it was not uncommon to hide one’s ancestry and/or religion (among Jews). There are Native American tribes that reject the theory that they all came over the Bering Strait (if I remember correctly, the Ojibwa/Chippewa are among those). There is even a strange old example of where Native American’s from the MicMac tribe (who resided around Nova Scotia, Quebec, and the northeast of Maine) were among the first Native and European contacts that resulted in a small group of MicMac were captured and brought to the Azores as slaves.

   I first found out I may well have Sephardic Jewish ancestry from doing genealogy, based on my family name, not DNA testing (I do not want to do DNA testing as I understand the data from that gets sent to a CCP database).

   I found a book “The Cross and the Pear Tree: A Sephardic Journey ” by Victor Perera who specifically wrote about the Perera/Pereira family and said that almost of people with thpse surnames were Sephardic. My mother’s maiden name would have been Pereira had they not Anglecized it to “Perry” by the time she was born. Recently I’ve been reading the very interesting book mainly about the migration of Jews from Spain (“Farewell Espana: The World of the Sephardim Remembered” by Howard M. Sachar). It’s a lo more complicated than I expected and I found out quite a few surprising things.

   One thing that makes it hard to be sure of Jewish ancestry is that so many times people were being forced to convert (especially during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions)… or be tortured and murdered. Apparently there were rabbis who said that lying about one’s Jewish background and religion to save your life was OK, so there were many variations on this from getting baptized and openly practicing Christianity while practicing Judaism in secret… to simply abandoning Judaism altogether. Often people changed their names if they converted … but even that didn’t necessarily save them.

   There were quite a few Sephardic Jews who upon the expulsion of Jews from Spain or Portugal … converted or fake-converted to Christianity… but migrated to places (both inside Spain or Portugal and other countries) where it was said the community was “soft” on rejecting Jews; one of those places was rural northern Spain… so it seems to be quite possibly there would be intermarriage with Basques and Sephardic Jews in those times.

   BTW – the first time Jews arrived in Ireland was 1079 (later expelled) and the first time they came to Scotland is unknown but the earliest concrete historical references to a Jewish presence in Scotland being from the late 17th century (both bits of info are from Wikipedia).

3. Ognagog May 19, 2023 Reply

   My background is predominantly Scottish, Irish and Norwegian. When we trace the geneology which numbers over 35,000 ancestors so far, we haven’t come across Native American names. We do have however DNA from two different Native American tribes. One is an Inuit tribe and the other one from further south. The DNA is quite specific as to the tribes. I would have to go and get the names which I don’t have here.
   At first I thought the Inuit was from when the Vikings settled in Iceland but then I discovered that the Scots also spent quite a lot of time up around there. So, who knows when these couplings took place.
   Also Christopher Columbus used maps of the Americas created by Scot’s. I think one of the names was the Drummonds’ and the other the Sinclairs’. They mapped out the oceans around the American before him. Very capable people! Don’t quote me on the names as I am quoting from memory and haven’t got the names in front of me right now. But if you want, I can get back to you.
   Also, the Vikings also had a presence on the American continent along time before Columbus.
   All of this allows for plenty of blood mingling.
   Add to that, that not all Native Americans are the same people. Different tribes have different lineages. Take the Cherokee for example, who claim ancestry to an ancient Jewish Princess.

4. Ognagog May 19, 2023 Reply

   My apologies, slip of the tongue. I mean to say when the Vikings settled in GREENLAND, not Iceland !

   I’ve just woken up see and haven’t had my second cup of coffee, lol.

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