Felice. Bedford, University of Arizona

GENEALOGY

For “very old” genetic genealogy Click Here

For paper and pen genealogy, scroll down.

Flora Allalouf, circa 1922, NYC

I have investigated ancestry for several branches of my family. The research started in December 1999 when I sent for my father’s records from the Mount Loretto Home for Boys in Staten Island, N.Y. He was sent there after he was orphaned at age 13. He later became the Chief Detective Investigator for the District Attorney’s office in Brooklyn, NY, but I digress. Previously, we did not have any information on that side of the family. On my mother's side, starting points were what my mother remembered and information contained in a sprial-bound notebook. The notebook was from when I was 11 years old and entered answers to questions I asked my beloved mother's mother, an immigrant from Salonica who spoke 7 languages. She was never thrilled about discussing the past – in any language.

 

I have been able to construct extended family trees for several branches. I used to post them on the web but had to take them down because of a few suspicious individuals.

 

I need more  information on:

 For discussion on any of these branches, contact bedford@u.arizona.edu

Information came from birth, death, and marriage certificates, citizenship applications, social security applications, ships passengers' lists, census records, newspapers, burial records, and libraries.  I have discovered and contacted more than a dozen cousins throughout the world.

Then my attention turned to genetic genealogy followed by population genetics. Next will be medical genealogy and genetics.

Here’s an analysis from what I first started the genetic quest: Who's your mama?. I leave it up for historical reasons - so much has advanced in so short a time. For the modern work, see the journal articles in the Publication section of my main page.  

 

Further Information:

For your ancestry through DNA there are two main sources: familytreedna.com and 23andme.com. You can have yourself and/or your family tested. Family tree dna remains the leader in deep maternal side (mitochondrial DNA) and deep paternal side (Y chromosome for men only) while 23andme can’t be beat for the rest of your DNA with more than half a million positions along the genome tested for pennies.

For Sephardic Genealogy, try my brother’s site:  Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture

Did your ancestors come through Ellis Island? Go to Ellis Island and search by surname for ship's passenger lists.

There's also an Italian Genealogical group (good info for New York of any ethnicity), obitsarchive (though it costs a few bucks to read an obit), the Mormon site (www.lds.org, good for England, South America, especially baptism records), the rootsweb site (good for free SSDI searches) and many others.

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