“Ich bin ein Berliner: (Re)uniting Five Half-siblings from Four Different Mothers” will be the topic of a presentation by genealogist Michael Tobias for the Sunday, March 27, 2022, meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois at 2 p.m. CST. Register/RSVP at https://jgsi.org/event-4559075.

In this online presentation, which is free and open to the public, Michael Tobias will describe the process that began in July 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, when a woman asked for help in identifying her newly-discovered (via DNA) Jewish birth father. She could not imagine the story about to unfold.

“In the next three weeks, following the DNA trail and building family trees for each of eight significant DNA hits on three different websites, her ties to four half-siblings were identified, all sharing the same father but with four different mothers,” Michael said. “To be certain of the connections between the DNA matches and the half-siblings, it was necessary to use the JRI-Poland database to create family trees going back to the late 1700s. In the process, the accuracy of the DNA-estimated family relationships could be compared with the true family relationships and the impact of any endogamy could be analyzed.”

Michael Tobias is a co-founder and board member of Jewish Records Indexing-Poland (1995-); vice president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain (JGSGB; 2019-); Honorary Research…