Shalom and welcome to the Find Your Jewish Ancestry (FYJA) website.

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I'm the Founder and President of Find My Jewish Ancestry Heshemiyah Nunnes De Fonseca Douglas.

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You see in my own ancestral background I can find both Sephardic and Ashkenazim Jewish Ancestry (Spanish, Portuguese, English, Scottish & Russian origin), however, it has taken me many years to understand how to identify the ancestral and DNA Jewish ancestors just as it may for many of you reading this introduction. These difficulties and complexities in identifying Jewish ancestry are common in the United States & the Americas as well as other locations which I will speak to in great detail later in our articles and lecture episodes.

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As I began on my ancestral search about 8 years ago, at first it appeared, that I may have just a few scant Jewish cousins in my DNA relative pool beginning with a test on the health-focused website 23 and Me. However, as I began to more diligently search, take additional DNA tests and expand my potential DNA relative pool I began to find more and more Jewish DNA cousins with names like Cohen, Levy, Myers, Goldstein, Abraham, and Katz as well as historically important Sephardic names like Nunez, Henriques, Aguilar, and Mendez. These Cousins span the range as identified by the DNA tests which are highly limited in scope as I will get into in Lecture #1, which is the Jewish Ancestry 101 lecture. This information points to DNA cousins with anywhere from 1 – 5 percent European Jewish DNA to in one case I’ve located even 100% European Jewish DNA.

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Of course the stronger the percentage of Jewish DNA in DNA relative the better as the tests indicate that you will have one or more shared ancestors, in this case for me 5th and 6th great grandparent from around the 1700’s time frame.

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So that gets into the very basics of how the FYJA methodology for finding your unknown Jewish ancestry can begin to work for you. It does take a lot of time, work, and energy to find much of this information and make it meaningful, like building a very difficult puzzle from scratch – but if it’s important to you have an affinity to Jewish life or religion or just have a story form a grandparent, parent or other relatives that some past ancestor may have been Jewish, Well, you may find the search for Jewish ancestry exciting - as I do!

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With that I hope you find this information and what the FYJA is all about, helpful – that is we are here to help people explore, find and locate if possible any links to a Jewish ancestral past.