A Research Tool for Sephardic Genealogy
Most people looking for Sephardic ancestry will never find a document.
That is not a failure of your research. The records were destroyed on purpose, five centuries ago, by people who intended exactly this result. This site exists to tell you what the surviving evidence can and cannot support — and to hand you a testable next step either way.
The one rule everything here follows
The citation carries the claim, never the marker. A surname does not prove Jewish descent. A haplogroup does not. A percentage does not. A named person in a dated record does.
Every competitor sells surname lists and confident percentages. We don't, because those are the two things that most reliably manufacture a false family history — and once a family believes one, it propagates through trees for generations.
What is here
An archival register of 533 documents and 658 surnames, with 489 linked manuscript images; a guide to researching a family line that starts with archives rather than with DNA; and a comparison tool that measures your DNA against a medieval Jewish community and a same-period non-Jewish control, and reports the difference with its uncertainty.
The scope is western Jewish ancestry broadly — Sephardi and converso lines, but also Provençal (Comtadin) and Tzarfati (French) Jewry, communities most people researching this never learn existed, and whose expulsions fed directly into the populations they are searching.
What we will not do
- Give you a single confident number.
- Report DNA sharing with a Jewish population without a control population from the same time and place.
- Let an empty result read as a negative one. The answer is often undetermined — insufficient sampling, and that is an honest finding, not a broken search.
- Treat a coat of arms, a surname list or a haplogroup letter as evidence of descent.