Hello all, I recently attended a Genealogical conference which proved to be very enlightening for me. Most of us are aware of the stories in the old Testament when the Babylonians came to conquer Jerusalem. The Children of Israel were scattered among the nations, so the Bible says. Well, the subject of the presentation was the Diaspora and how it relates to us in this year of 2002. The researcher presented a paper on tracking the dispersion of the Israelites through the nations of the world by using language study. It seems that there are some root words of the Hebrew language that hold constant in meaning and have been adopted into the languages of the people among whom the Israelites settled after the Diaspora. I found this to be fascinating. In school in Queensland, we were taught the Latin Root's and required to memorize them. This has helped me figure out the possible meaning of a word that I had not seen before. In same vein, these Hebrew root words can be found in language (particularly those group of languages into which the German language family falls) and thus attesting to the fact that the Hebrew's did scatter at the time of the Babylonian invasion as recorded in the bible. So what other things can we expect from that? I guess we can suppose that not all these people who escaped Jerusalem just intermarried among themselves, but that they married with the people among whom they settled. Our German ancestors did the same thing. For a couple of generations they kept to themselves and then they married out of the German cultural group thus increasing the genealogical base for all of us to track. The question then arises, how many of us then carry genetic material that can be tracked back to the Diaspora? After hearing this paper, I suspect that there are more of us than we suspect who can track our genetic material to the Diaspora. When it was pointed out to me that my maiden name of EISER was in fact of Jewish Origin, it was a very new thought to me. At the family reunions last year in Drayton and Cabarlah, I presented this same proposition to the family gathered there and the thought was expressed that "We are not Jews. We are Church of England (plug in any religion that you want here." The implication of the Diaspora has nothing to do with the religion we follow - it has to do with the genetic markers that we all share. By following the Genetic markers, we will be able to connect up with distant branches of the families to whom we belong. We may not have the information on the intervening generations, but we will be able to make positive identification of our living relatives through this modern method of identification. It is a known fact that not all of our ancestors migrated to Australia and left no one in their native lands. There were aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews who remained behind to carry on with their lives. Contact was lost with the families at "home" and wars have divided cultures and countries and decimated family contacts so the last best hope of connecting up with living relatives is this genetic testing. May I urge you all to participate in such testing if it is available to you. Just a thought. cheers, Beverly.

Beverley's comments are very interesting and enlightening. I have not as yet done enough research on the subject but when I started out on this project I discovered that my ancestors did not come from Germany as I was always told. They actually came from Pomerania as did more than two thirds of the Germanic migrants of the 19th century to Queensland. I pursued this a little further and fund that in fact many of them did not even originate in Pomerania but in Volhynia. This is a state or former nation in the Ural mountain regions in Russia. Further research suggested that a number of them actually came from further south and they were Slavs. So in reality I am not of German descent but of Slavic descent. So too are most of you. Now somewhere I came across something that gave indication of being of Jewish origin. I went back to the bible and the biblical history books. There I found out that in the Northern tribes disintegration programme they actually moved across through Turkey and the now Russian states toward central and southern Europe. There they became a part of the community and married and inter-married. My wife's family often said that they were of Jewish decent but we could never get a sensible logical answer on how they came to that conclusion. Since beginning this project I have come to believe that the Hoffmann families descended from Jews and are in many instances still Jews. The interesting thing that I have not as yet uncovered is that in Hitler's Germany they persecuted Jews first and foremost. What intrigues me is that these Jews had lived in Germany and Poland for generations. Maybe they had lived there for centuries. It intrigues me that there were so many of these Jews in Poland especially when I find that our ancestors came from there and when I track back to find this possible Jewish connection. My daughter who is doing a history masters degree I think, tells me that her research suggests that when the Prussians took over all northern Europe they began a persecution campaign to remove anybody not a pure German or Pole. She suggests that the major reason for many of our ancestor migrating to Australia and the USA was because of this. She suggests that it continued in a mild form right up until Hitler came to power and then he made it a major form. I have yet to find the evidence to support her theory. I would seriously like to pursue this line of thought and see how close I am to truth. In fact as soon as I stop doing the hundred things I am doing right now I will make that my major project and hopefully do it before I leave this world. Of course to tell anybody that would bring the response Beverley received. Somehow our mentality makes it difficult for us to see Jews as being anything beyond religion in Australia or money makers in the USA. Although I have no proof of any sort and not been able to trace her ancestry at this stage, I have no doubt in my mind from what I have gathered that my great grandmother Henrietta was of Jewish descent and came from Volhynia. Albert Grulke -----Original Message----- From: Beverly Markham [mailto:pussims@cableone.net] Sent: Thursday, 31 January 2002 3:05 To: Subject: the Diaspora and our heritage. Hello all, I recently attended a Genealogical conference which proved to be very enlightening for me. Most of us are aware of the stories in the old Testament when the Babylonians came to conquer Jerusalem. The Children of Israel were scattered among the nations, so the Bible says. Well, the subject of the presentation was the Diaspora and how it relates to us in this year of 2002. The researcher presented a paper on tracking the dispersion of the Israelites through the nations of the world by using language study. It seems that there are some root words of the Hebrew language that hold constant in meaning and have been adopted into the languages of the people among whom the Israelites settled after the Diaspora. I found this to be fascinating. In school in Queensland, we were taught the Latin Root's and required to memorize them. This has helped me figure out the possible meaning of a word that I had not seen before. In same vein, these Hebrew root words can be found in language (particularly those group of languages into which the German language family falls) and thus attesting to the fact that the Hebrew's did scatter at the time of the Babylonian invasion as recorded in the bible. So what other things can we expect from that? I guess we can suppose that not all these people who escaped Jerusalem just intermarried among themselves, but that they married with the people among whom they settled. Our German ancestors did the same thing. For a couple of generations they kept to themselves and then they married out of the German cultural group thus increasing the genealogical base for all of us to track. The question then arises, how many of us then carry genetic material that can be tracked back to the Diaspora? After hearing this paper, I suspect that there are more of us than we suspect who can track our genetic material to the Diaspora. When it was pointed out to me that my maiden name of EISER was in fact of Jewish Origin, it was a very new thought to me. At the family reunions last year in Drayton and Cabarlah, I presented this same proposition to the family gathered there and the thought was expressed that "We are not Jews. We are Church of England (plug in any religion that you want here." The implication of the Diaspora has nothing to do with the religion we follow - it has to do with the genetic markers that we all share. By following the Genetic markers, we will be able to connect up with distant branches of the families to whom we belong. We may not have the information on the intervening generations, but we will be able to make positive identification of our living relatives through this modern method of identification. It is a known fact that not all of our ancestors migrated to Australia and left no one in their native lands. There were aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews who remained behind to carry on with their lives. Contact was lost with the families at "home" and wars have divided cultures and countries and decimated family contacts so the last best hope of connecting up with living relatives is this genetic testing. May I urge you all to participate in such testing if it is available to you. Just a thought. cheers, Beverly. ============================== To join Ancestry.com and access our 1.2 billion online genealogy records, go to: http://www.ancestry.com/rd/redir.asp?targetid=571&sourceid=1237