Jewish Genealogical Society of Canada (Toronto)

This will be a repeat and update of the talk that he and Elise Friedman presented at the 2007 IAJGS genealogy conference in Salt Lake City.

The project concerns a genealogical puzzle: Over forty disparate families have been identified with a common paternal ancestor who lived several hundred years ago. The families have different surnames and different known geographical origins, yet exhibit matching or near-matching Y-DNA characteristics. That they have a common ancestor is a virtual certainty, but much about the ancestor and the descendant families has presented a puzzle.

Progress on solving the puzzle is reported, including:

1. Analysis of Y-DNA results on over 60 persons representing the 40+ families –Litvaks and Galizianers
2. advanced DNA testing techniques reveal matching results and shared DNA anomalies
3. identification of the specific sub-haplogroup, or clade, and associated deep ancestral roots of the families,
4. development of a phylogenetic tree showing interfamily relationships
5. explanation of Levite status in only some families
6. comparison of group DNA characteristics with tests of known Levites
7. addressing the question: Sephardi or Ashkenazi roots?, and
8. a refined estimate of the Common Ancestor's life dates.

Herbert Huebscher was born in Vienna, Austria, and came to the U.S. as a child in 1938. An electrical engineer by education, he received BEE, MS, and MBA degrees. After a career in the electronics industry (the last 32 years with Hazeltine Corporation on Long Island), he was a full time professor of business strategy at Long Island University, then an adjunct professor before retiring in 1998. Long involved with his family's genealogy, he ventured into DNA based genealogy in 2002 as the group administrator of the Hubscher family DNA project. His paper reporting on that project was published in the winter 2003 issue of Avotaynu . Since 2004 he has been the group administrator and coordinator of the DNA based “WIRTH”genealogy research project linking a number of seemingly disparate families to a common ancestor. The WIRTH project was the subject of an article in the summer 2007 issue of Avotaynu .