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Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2003-07 > 1057193312


From: "John F. Chandler" <>
Subject: Re: [DNA] NYTimes.com Article: Celtic Found to Have Ancient Roots
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 20:15 EST
In-Reply-To: Elizabeth524@aol.com message <75.14b62833.2c34cbf0@aol.com> of Wed, 2 Jul 2003 17:59:45 -0600


Beth wrote:
> known as the Scotch-Irish. I was supposed to be descended from these people --
> and indeed I am -- but they are not primarily Celtic. Instead many of those we
> have tested in the Melungeon DNA Project are coming out R1b, but centered in
> Iberia,

I have to ask: what do you mean "centered in Iberia"? If you mean simply
that you found more hits there in the YSTR database, you are forgetting
to normalize by the number of samples taken from the various countries.
The British Isles are very underrepresented in that database, and France
is even more so. If you mean instead that the matches in the FTDNA
customer database all said their ancestry was from Spain or Portugal,
that's a different matter.

> great, great grandmother's gravestone in a Knoxville, TN cemetery labeled as
> "Rebecca Cowan -- Mother of Israel".

Um, Beth, I think you need a reality check here. The forename "Israel"
was very popular in the US among the Bible-reading Protestants, along
with a host of other biblical names, like Adonijah, Hezekiah, and (my
favorite) Maherhallallhashbaz. The fact that Israel Cowan erected a
headstone for his mother Rebecca is not at all remarkable, and the
fact that he couldn't resist putting his own name on it, too, is not
surprising. This is in no way an indication of crypto-Judaism.

> the Psalms of David
> (NOT the New Testament) and that embedded on the top of the cover page of the
> book is the Hebrew word for God in Hebrew script.

It may interest you to know that the Protestant Reformation was founded
upon principles that included purifying the scriptures by going back and
studying the Hebrew originals. Among the devout, Hebrew ranked above
Latin as a must-know language.

John Chandler

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