Hello Vosper Cousins, and Happy Holidays to everyone!
I just returned from a vacation in Florida where I got to meet up with Cousin Paula (Vosper), when we went out to lunch and on a boat trip looking for manatees:
Teri on the left, Paula on the right. Looking very movie star-ish with those shades, don’t you think? If you’re thinking we look alike, we are 1st cousins…..
At our last condo stop on the vacation I picked up a book called “The Queen’s Fool” by Philippa Gregory, which I thought some of you might be interested in reading. The story takes place in the 1550’s, predominantly in England. It is the story of a young Jewish girl, whose mother was burned at the stake for heresy in Aragorn, Spain, who goes to England and gets entangled in the royal intrigues of the court of Queen Mary. It gives good insight to the plight of Jews practicing Catholicism in order to escape the Inquisition and the religious purges of the period.
This is during the time our common 11th great grandfather, Johannes Vosper, would have been living in Liskeard, Cornwall. For the most recent joiners of our little group, we had found this little tidbit in a book:
You can see this in context on Google Books, here. This was our first indication that our family had any Jewish origins. As we got in DNA testing results, we consistently found Ashkenazi heritage in low amounts (typically 2-5%), and when Robert Vosper had his Y-DNA tested, it came back with a Jewish Haplogroup, J-M267, all of which confirms that is was the Vosper lineage that contributed the Ashkenazi heritage, and confirms the heritage claimed in the book, written in 1873.
We don’t know when the family stopped practicing Judaism, but I am pretty sure none of the American branches ever practiced it after 1900. Do any of our Australian or British Cousins have families that still practiced it? In any case, the book is interesting as it gives good insight into the problems encountered and how the destruction of religious materials and heresy trials affected Jews in England and Europe.
On a similar note, I have Amazon Prime, and found “Rebecca” as a movie available for free to watch. It is based on the novel by Daphne DuMaurier, and is mostly true to the book. It takes place in Cornwall, which is why I mention it. This sounds weird, but it was made for television, and the recording includes commercials, which I guess were filmed in the 1950s. Even the commercials, all for gas appliances, we interesting to watch!
On the DNA front, John Vosper in Australia has sent in his Y-DNA test for processing, and we are anxiously awaiting results. The latest status:
Our hope is that his DNA will come in a close match to Robert Vosper’s, further confirming the Jewish lineage. I plan to enroll John’s results in the FTDNA Cornwall and J1 Projects, to further improve our presence there. In checking on the HUGE project, J1, I found they had ‘clustered’ Robert’s Y findings as follows:
VERY INTERESTING, that so many people in this grouping have the last name “Jordan”. Could this be a clue as to our family origins?
The Cornwall project is not showing much in the way of matches:
It is interesting that Thomas Dawe matches a lot of the markers that Robert has (N46809, highlighted in yellow) – I thought I recalled seeing a DAWES spouse of a Vosper at some point, but I don’t find it on my tree, now….
Need many more Cornish people to test their DNA!
In looking at FTDNA’s Country of Origin for 37 marker testing for Robert, we have, in part:
This is interesting, because in all the genetic distances less than 4, all the matches are in the UK. At a genetic distance of -4 there is one person from Germany. “Genetic distance” relates to how many of the 37 markers tested are different – in this case 4 are. Generally, the Y chromosome is very stable with a variation happening sporadically -- maybe once every 4 generations or so a change will occur in one marker. So, if this GERMAN match is significant (though 1 is hardly significant!), it would indicate that the common ancestor may have been as many as 16-20 generations back. At least one (undocumented) source says that the Vosper family came from Silesia, which was on the border of Germany and the Czech Republic and Poland.
Lastly, I’ve received another book “The Lost Jews of Cornwall” but have not read it yet. I have checked the index, but there are no Vosper, Trevosper, or Treffosper. This will be a much tougher read than “The Queen’s Fool”.
Enough for now!
Cousin Teri
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