genealogy

This comes from the Jewish Heritage E-Report (June 27, 2008)
World News about Jewish Art, Architecture & Historic sites from the International Survey of Jewish Monuments (ISJM)
Edited by Samuel D. Gruber / Contact and send news items to
samuelgruber_at_gmail.com

Jamaica: Documentation of 18th Jewish Cemetery at Hunt's Bay
(Ainsley Henriques, Rachel Frankel, Anne Hersh and Samuel Gruber contributed to this article)

In January (2008), Caribbean Volunteer Expeditions (CVE) sponsored a successful project to inventory and document existing conditions of the historic Hunt's Bay Jewish Cemetery, the oldest known Jewish cemetery in Jamaica. ISJM provided logistical support and funds to purchase equipment necessary for the survey. The cemetery was the burial place for Jews, many fleeing the Inquisition and anti-Semitism in Europe. They came to Port Royal, the 17th century entré port, a desolate sandy spit at the end of what is now known as the Palisadoes peninsula enclosing Kingston Harbor. They found freedom to worship with few restrictions (but higher taxes).

Race, ethnicity, culture, family...all important to people. But usually we think of these things completely separate from reality.

I have been reading several books that together have put some of this into perspective. Each of us are part of the whole sweep of human evolution, and we are all related in a very real, genetic way.

This man might be your ancestor:

(Ramesses II, king of Egypt, 13th century BC)

Yep, I bet lots of people today could, if only we had all the information, trace their ancestry back to this man. I would guess somewhere in the millions of people today are his descendants.

Go back far enough and we are all related. This is a fact. Or, more precisely, every little piece of our DNA ultimately derives from a common ancestor that can be traced back to some specific time and place.

This has most accurately and famously been done with our mitochondrial DNA. This DNA is something we all get from our mothers, so it is a strictly maternal descent. Men contribute nothing to it. In 1987 an amazing paper in the Journal Nature presented an analysis of modern mitochondrial DNA to show that all human beings can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to a common ancestor living in East Africa some 100-150,000 years ago. At that time some 20,000 anatomically modern humans were around.