X-No-archive: yes
Roberta-
Some questions to ask before you jump to conclusions regarding Sepharidic ancestry would be:
Who are these folks from Majorca? Are they all from the same documented family group? How long have they been in Spain and do they know their ancestry well (how far back) ? What is their surname? They could "just" be Ashkenazim who moved some time well after the Jewish expulsion of 1492. That will just have
to be something you explore with those cousins.
The surname refers to a town in Western Germany so could date back a long time from when Jews first settled there (middle ages).
That seems to be the case for other surnames such as Heilbronn/Halpern from the same region. However, with such names many people who hold the name now are likely to be late adopters of the surname (that is, took it for whatever reason when asked/forced to adopt surnames in the early 1800's in Eastern Europe).
So, you could indeed descend from a group that went, say, from Spain to France and then to Germany and into Eastern Europe.
More DNA testing of your Oppenheim cousins and this Majorca group could potentially straighten things out. However, don't be surprised if it becomes a long standing mystery.
Good luck!
Steve Bloom
Central Virginia
Roberta Berman wrote:
I traced my Oppenheim line back to my gr-grandfather Yitchak Oppenheim, born in Brest-Litovsk in the early 1800s. YDNA testing on that line closely matches
others from Majorca. FTDNA Family Finder has a 3-5 cousin match with my immediate family and me with someone who knows that his family is from Majorca.
My origin map on FTDNA shows roots in Spain, the Mediterranean, Turkey and Eastern Europe.
So it seems there is the possibility that the Oppenheim line goes back to Majorca. Oppenheim is not a Sephardic name, so at some point this unknown ancestral family's surname would have been changed. So my question is, what are the possibilities of where the name change to Oppenheim might have occurred?
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