It always bothered me on Full House, how the Tanner girls all had blonde hair and blue eyes, yet their dad, played by Jewish-American actor Bob Saget, had dark hair and eyes. The girls’ mother was of Greek descent; we know this because of their uncle Jesse Katsopolis.
Then, to further this unlikely concept, when Uncle Jesse and Aunt Becky had twins, their boys had light skin along with blonde hair and blue eyes. One fan theory on the Internet speculates that it was Uncle Joey who was the true father of all 5 kids.
And while that is funny to think about, I now have come to a full understanding of how dark featured parents (like my wife and myself) have children with noticeably lighter features (like our kids).
We have to keep in mind that we adopt half of our DNA from our father and half from our mother, but in the 50% from each parent, it’s a random amount from each.
So it’s this simple, even if there is less “blonde hair, blue eye” genes in the parents, their own children may feature that “hidden” DNA. This also explains how different siblings can look from each other.
To help bring this story to life, below is a breakdown of my own DNA, according toMyHeritage. My maternal grandmother was Mexican and my maternal grandfather was Italian. My mom’s DNA test results showed only 2% Italian, but 15.2% Sephardic Jewish and 14% Middle Eastern. While I definitely received a large amount of DNA from the Mexican side, I adopted absolutely no DNA from the Italian side; which now we realize was a Jewish-Middle Eastern mix.
My DNA:
37.4% North and Western Europe (Germany, France, The Netherlands)
31.8% Iberian (Spain, Portugal)
21.6% Native Central American (Mayan, Aztec, etc.)
6.1% East Europe
2.3% Balkan
0.8% Middle East
Now let’s take a look at my wife’s DNA. Her mother, like mine, is also half Italian. From my wife’s DNA test, we learned that in addition to being Italian, my wife is a decent amount Greek.
My Wife’s DNA:
31.8% England
23.9% Scandinavia
20.1% Greece
7.8% Balkan
5.8% Italy
3.9% Finland
2.7% Ireland, Scotland, Wales
1.9% North Africa
1.4% Ashkenazi Jewish
0.7% Nigeria
But when you break down the most abundant DNA showing up, you’ll see how our kids ending up getting the lighter features. Below are the results of me adding together the DNA from both my wife and me, then dividing it by two. I have ranked the results beginning with the most prominent. The DNA in italics are from my side, the DNA from my wife is in bold font.
Our Children:
18.7% North and Western Europe (Germany, France, The Netherlands)
15.9% Iberian (Spain, Portugal)
15.9% England
11.95% Scandinavia
10.8% Central American-Mexican
10.05% Greek
5.05% Balkan (3.9% Balkan + 1.15% Balkan)
3.05% East Europe
2.9% Italian
1.95% Finland
1.35% Ireland, Scotland, Wales
0.95% North Africa
0.7% Ashkenazi Jewish
0.4% Middle East
So in theory, our kids largely show the German-Dutch-English-Scandinavian genes, while the Spanish-Central American-Greek-Sephardic Jewish-Middle Eastern are more hidden.
Even still, I won’t be surprised, as our kids get older, that they will begin showing more of the rest of their unseen DNA.
I now have peace with why the kids of Full House look the way they do. If you’re curious about your own DNA, you can do like my wife and I did and purchase a kit fromMyHeritage.
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Despite growing up “half Italian, half Mexican”, my mom learned about a month ago after I took a DNA test through MyHeritage that the Italian side… well, wasn’t so Italian after all.
I showed up as 0% Italian, despite my great-grandfather immigrating to America from Italy over a hundred years ago; having an Italian first and last name, as well as speaking only Italian. Turns out, like America is now, Italy served as a melting pot; as did Spain. So while my Italian great-parents were from Italy and were culturally Italian, they weren’t necessarily Italian by ethnicity.
To make things more complex, these DNA tests don’t measure the exact percentage of your actual ethnicity, but instead, they reveal the more dominant genes that you adopt from both your parents. Therefore, for example; siblings can take a test and one can show 12% Irish but the other doesn’t show any Irish.
After finding out I showed up as 0% Italian, my mom got too curious and decided to take a MyHeritage test as well. Unsurprisingly, knowing what I know now, my mom’s test shows some decent percentages that didn’t show up at all on my test. I’ll place in bold font the ones that largely matched mine:
32.9% Central American (Mayan/Aztec)
22%Iberian (Spanish/Portuguese)
15.2% Sephardic Jewish (via Spain)
14% Middle Eastern/West Asian (Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Palestine and Georgia)
7.8% Greek
4.5% Italian
2.6% Baltic (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia)
2.0% West African (Benin, Burkina Faso, the island nation of Cape Verde, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, the island of Saint Helena, Senegal, Sierra Leone, São Tomé and Príncipe and Togo)
Thanks to my mom’s test results, I learned, in theory, I am about 7.6% Jewish, 7% Middle Eastern, 3.9% Greek, 2.25% Italian and 1% African.
Those particular ethnic traits didn’t show up at all on my DNA test; other than mine showing up 0.8% Middle Eastern. But clearly, my Middle Eastern DNA is very weak, whereas my mom’s is very strong.
So as for my mom, my sister, and me, we are definitely part Jewish, Middle Eastern, Greek, and even African.
If it weren’t for my mom’s MyHeritage DNA test, we would not know this.
Of course, that’s in addition to knowing we’re more Mayan/Aztec and Spanish/Portuguese more than anything on my mom’s side.
But the story doesn’t end here, because now, my sister has ordered a DNA test. In a another month or so, we’ll learn if there are other parts of our DNA hiding in there somewhere.
And if you interested in taking a DNA test like my mom and I did, here’s the link toMyHeritage.
This is me in a video I made for you, which explains all this in a 5 and a half minute video, in case you prefer that over reading the 1378 word blog post below it, which I wrote 7 years ago.
Meet your great-grandfather Isaac. Or Ishmael. Or maybe even both…
How do you determine who ethnically is a “white person” and who is not? Are Jews considered to be white? What about Greeks and Italians? And though Central and South Americans typically have tan skin, why is it there something about them still seems sort of white, as opposed to a person from India or China? These are some of the “side effect” questions that will be answered as I explain my theory on the origin of race and religion.
No, this theory doesn’t start with Adam and Eve. Nor does it start with Noah and his family repopulating the world after the Great Flood. It starts 20 generations after Adam, and 10 generations after Noah, with Abraham (the father of the Jewish and the Arab people), being promised by God that he would have a son in his old age. After waiting and having no sign of this coming true, Abraham’s wife Sarah convinced him to sleep with their Egyptian maidservant Hagar, in order to have a son to carry on the family lineage. At age 86, Abraham goes with his wife’s plan (like the way Adam ate the fruit after Eve convinced him to) and has a son with his maidservant- the son is named Ishmael. However, 13 years later Abraham’s wife Sarah gets pregnant with a son, as God promised, and this son is named Isaac.
Abraham eventually sends away his maidservant Hagar and his son Ishmael into the wilderness (Genesis 21:14), and raises Isaac his as true first-born son. Today, thousands of years later, it is through Ishmael that Arabs and Muslims link their heritage through. Accordingly, Jews and Christians trace through heritage back to Isaac. Now we are in the meat of my theory.
As generations passed and both families migrated from their Middle Eastern homelands, the descendants of Ishmael moved south and east- to Africa, Asia, and America (becoming the Native American Indians in North America and the Aztec Indians in Central and South America). In fact, the angel of the Lord told Hagar that Ishmael “will live east of all his brothers” (Genesis 16:12). Meanwhile the descendants of Isaac moved north and west- to Europe, Russia, and eventually to America (killing off, running off, or marrying the Native American Indians).
Notice how today the countries that are represented by the descendants of Ishmael are generally practice religions that do not involve the Judeo-Christian God (worshipped by Christians, Catholics, and Jews) but instead are tied Hinduism, Animism, Taoism, Buddhism, Communism (Atheism) and Islam. And of course the descendants of Isaac are matched to the Christianized nations: For example, Scotland is mainly Protestant, Ireland is mainly Catholic, and England is mainly Anglican (Presbyterian).
Almost 2,000 years ago thanks the Apostle Paul’s missionary journeys to preach Christ where the Jews had already settled (in Europe, specifically the Mediterranean areas) and also the birth of Christianity as a whole, the countries that were already familiar with the Judeo-Christian God were basically the first to get introduced to Jesus as the Messiah. As far as all the Ishmael-descended areas, like modern day Africa and Asia that were less familiar or not familiar at all with Christianity, they were not and have not typically been as generally open and accepting to “our God” as Isaac’s descendants.
I do believe that whether or not a nation (or individual person) is a descendent of Isaac has much to do with their religion, race, and culture. However, there are obviously exceptions. One of them is Russia, which had been mainly Christian up until the point of its embrace of Communism. Another exception is African-Americans, whom most identify with Christianity, as opposed to most Africans living in Africa.
And then there’s the “half breed” nations that make up Central and South America. For the most part, their blood is mixed of Indigenous Americans (Native American, Aztec, etc.) who migrated from Asia through modern day Alaska, and European lineage from those who “discovered” America. So in essence, the inhabitants of modern day Central and South America are half Isaackian, half-Ishmaelese; though they have accepted the religious beliefs of Isaac’s descendants (largely Catholic). Read more about this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas
Yes, I did just now make up and use the words Isaackian (to describe the descendants of Isaac who are prone to believe in the Judeo-Christian God) and Ishmaelese (to describe the descendants of Ishmael who typically do not). And now that you hopefully understand what those terms represent, I will begin using them frequently.
What started much of this thought process was when I recently began “Climbing the Family Tree” and realized that so many of my ancestors had last names that are Jewish (Schell, Klaar, Ullman, Wiseman, Vite) yet there is no solid proof that I actually am- only family rumors and tradition. If I assume that none of the people in my family tree were Jewish, well, still, I have Jewish names in my family tree. So that got me thinking, Jewish people and “white people” are essentially the same thing, coming from the same common ancestors. Whereas someone who is Japanese (Ishmaelese) wouldn’t have last names in their family tree that would resemble a Jewish last name.
So going back to one of the questions I asked in the beginning, are Jewish people considered to be white? Yes. Though their homeland is Israel and though they are a Middle Eastern people group, they blend in with us Americans so well. And that’s part of my fascination with pointing out which celebrities are Jewish. Half the casts of Friends and Seinfeld are Jewish (The Ethnic Backgrounds of the Cast of Friends and Seinfeld) as well as The Wonder Years (The Ethnicity of the Cast of The Wonder Years), but the fact that most of us don’t know which ones are or aren’t shows that despite most of us being a mix of European blood, those Middle Eastern descended Jews are still our cousins.
Of course ultimately, it doesn’t matter which of us descended from Isaac or Ishmael or how much blood we have of either (I’m around 12.5% Ishmaelese); it just predicts the tone of our skin and our traditional religion, according to my theory. By no means do I see the Isaackians as superior to Ishmaelese for the fact that I myself worship the Judeo-Christian God. But what I do recognize is what God himself proclaimed to Abraham regarding Isaac and Ishmael:
But God said, “No, but Sarah your wife will bear you a son and you shall call his name Isaac, and I will establish my everlasting covenant for his descendants after him,” (Genesis 17:19).
“As for Ishmael, I have heard you; behold I will bless him, and make him fruitful and multiply him exceedingly. He shall become the father of 12 princes, and I will make him a great nation,” (Genesis 17:20).
What’s most important from those verses I just quoted is that God promised to establish his covenant through the line of Isaac. In other words, the savior of the world would come in the form of a Jew. Not to mention that the Isaackians coincidently would hold the responsibility of sharing their God with the Ismaelese- that’s why Christian missionaries exist. That’s why Christianity is now the largest religion of the Ishmaelese country of South Korea, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korea#Religion
We all have the same great-grandparents at the tops of our family trees. I try to imagine how different the world would be if Abraham wouldn’t have had a son with Hagar, if he just would have waited another 13 years for his own wife to become pregnant. But he jumped the gun and changed the course of history (for him, it was the future) forever. Though if he didn’t, I wouldn’t exist, being that my grandmother is Mexican. Not only would I have not written this and you wouldn’t have read it, but there wouldn’t have been any of this to write about.
At some point, it starts to become irrelevant. Which part of your family tree actually matters?
Fort Payne, AL in 1976- my mom (bottom), her Italian dad and Mexican mother above her
Every family’s got one- the “family tree enthusiast”. It’s ultimately the person with the most natural motivation to find out where the family came from- not the people who simply say, “I’d love to know more about our heritage…” but instead, the one who actually gets to work on it. And after I found myself spending hours sometimes researching the origins of last names I had heard of in our family, I soon realized I was appointed by destiny to be the “family tree enthusiast.”
Since last May, my grandmother on my dad’s side has been helping me with the research. Her last name is Clowers; which last year when I looked it up was an English name and meant “people from the hills”. But this weekend after sitting down with my grandmother again, I discovered that “Clowers” was changed from “Klauer”, and that was changed from “Clore”, which was changed from “Klaar”, which was not English at all, but instead Dutch.
Chattanooga, TN in 1946- my great-grandparents on my dad's side: Francis Clowers & Madelee Wiseman
The highest I could climb up my family tree was to a Dutch Lutheran named Hans Michael Klaar (born in 1630) who married a Greek woman named Ursula Sybella (born in 1635). When I Googled the last name “Klaar”, I found more Jewish ties to it than anything else. It’s possible that further up the family tree the Klaar’s were Dutch Jews, but that would be near impossible to confirm.
Climbing back down the family tree, the next woman being married into the family was another Greek woman, Anna Barbara Maria. Then Dorothy Kaifer (German), then two more presumed German women (no last names given but I’m assuming they were German since the family had by that point moved to Germany), then surprisingly a Jewish woman named Nancy Ullman (it translates as “rich man”), then Mary Harris (English), then Emmaline Lunsford (English), then Polly Katherine Green (English, Jewish, or Irish), then finally, my great-grandmother Madelee Wiseman (typically a Jewish-German last name which translates “white man”).
same great-grandparents 37 years later
Then my grandmother (maiden name, Clowers) married my grandfather, John David Shell. All I know so far about his family tree are of Scottish (Scrimsher and Johnston), Cherokee Indian (name unknown), and German (Miller) origin. But the last name Shell has a potentially interesting origin: The Jews living in Germany were often given their last names by the Germans, who would insult them with last names translating to things like “stinky” and “ugly”. Shell used to be “Schell” and literally translates “loud, noisy, and clamorous”- which I would say is an insult. Plus, by Googling “Schell”, it’s Jewish people that pop up.
So what am I on my dad’s side of the family? Dutch-Greek-German-Jewish-Cherokee-Scottish-English. But I’m starting to come to the conclusion; what does really it matter anyway? At the top of both sides of my dad’s family tree are Dutch, Greek, and German. In the middle are Jewish and Cherokee. At the bottom of the trees are English and Scottish.
The Clowers-Wiseman family in 1953- my great-grandparents in the middle, my grandmother on the far right in the black dress
Which is more relevant? Am I more English and Scottish because those are the most recent? Am I less Dutch and Greek because those are at the top? Am I equally all of those things?
And that’s not to mention my mom’s side- she’s half Mexican and half Italian. But because of the rumors that my great-grandmother Mary Vite was Jewish (there are Jews with the last name Vite), I may not be ¼ Italian after all, but instead 1/8. Or what if she wasn’t half Jewish, but instead half Greek?
I will always be fascinated by ethnic backgrounds of people, but in a way, I am satisfied with what I know now about my own mysterious ancestors. Because what is most relevant in a family tree is not found by looking up, but instead by looking down and all around; it’s the people that still influence you, that love you, that care for you, and vice versa. That’s the part of your family tree that matters. And to be honest with you, I’m pretty dizzy after spending all that time so high up the family tree. It’s good to be back on the ground, with family members who are just as alive as I am.
Under the family tree: my Italian (and possibly Greek or Jewish?) grandfather Metallo; my mom's dad
It’s hard to fathom now, but the entire time my mom knew she was pregnant with me (from October 1980 to April 1981) her “boy name” for me was Mario Eugene Shell. But of course, my name is instead Nicholas Shane Shell. Why? I “didn’t look like a Mario”. In other words, I was too white.
In essence, I am a mixed race- technically only half white. One of the main ways I determine whether or not a person is “white” (other than their skin color) is by looking at their last name- if it ends in a vowel, they are probably not white. My mom’s maiden name was Metallo (Italian) and her mother’s maiden name was Mendez (it doesn’t end in a vowel but it’s common knowledge that Mexicans are not “white”- especially not the ones in my family- they have darker skin).
My dad (a Southern boy of English, German, Cherokee Indian, and distant Greek traces) had married this exotic black haired woman from the North (Buffalo, NY). It was assumed that their child would take after the more ethnic features, like mocha skin and black curly hair. But on April 20, 1981 at 8:37 PM, both my parents were amazed to hold a seemingly All-American baby.
They looked at each other, then my mom said to my dad, “He’s not a Mario. We need a new name.” A few hours later, before midnight, still on the day I was born, I was named Nicholas (a Greek name that is a popular Italian male name). My middle name is Shane, which is a form of Sean, which is a form of the Hebrew (Jewish) name, John. (Shane was considered for my first name but “Shane Shell” really doesn’t work.)
And that’s how I got my name- a quickly formed “plan B”. To imagine, if I looked more Mexican (like my sister, though she’s often mistaken for Hawaiian) or even a dark-skinned Italian, I would have been Mario Eugene. (My dad’s middle name is Eugene.) That’s means that growing up, everyone at school would have called me Super Mario and constantly made references to video game series. But I don’t think it would have been all that different from my actual childhood, where everyone sang “Nick-nick-nick-nick-nick-nick-nick-nick, Nickelodeon!” to me. And some people still do… Aunt Rosa!
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