Genealogy

The Rev. Al Sharpton said Sunday it was the "most shocking" news of his life when the civil rights leader learned he was a descendant of a slave owned by relatives of Strom Thurmond, the late senator who once led the segregationist South. "I couldn't describe the emotions that I've had over the last two or three days thinking about this," he said at a news conference. "Everything from anger and outrage to reflection, and to some pride and glory."

The Rev. Al Sharpton said he wants a DNA test to determine whether he is related to former segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond through his great-grandfather, a slave owned by an ancestor of the late senator. "I can't find out anything more shocking than I've already learned," Sharpton told the Daily News. Professional genealogists found that Sharpton's great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was a slave owned by Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was Strom Thurmond's great-great-grandfather.

About 3.5 million of today's Ashkenazi Jews -- about 40% of the Ashkenazi population -- are descended from four women, a genetic study indicates. Those women apparently lived somewhere in Europe within the last 2,000 years, but not necessarily in the same place or even the same century, said lead author Dr. Doron Behar of the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel.

A 5th century Irish warlord known as Niall of the Nine Hostages may literally be the father of his country, says a genetic survey, which shows he has as many as 3 million direct male descendants.

For Asha Jordan, questions about who she is and where she comes from always have been hard to answer. The 12-year-old from Baldwin Hills knew that most of her family came generations ago from Africa -- but not much else. Over the last six weeks, Asha and a group of other students have been spending their Saturdays in an auditorium of the View Park Preparatory Accelerated Charter School, trying to trace their heritages.

Reclaiming a neglected part of California's past, historians Monday unveiled an immense data bank that for the first time chronicles the lives and deaths of more than 100,000 Indians in the Spanish missions of the 18th and 19th centuries.

African Americans hoping to use DNA to find their roots may have to look harder than previously thought, researchers said Thursday in a study suggesting Africans are too genetically mixed to make tracing easy. Several companies now offer to help Americans trace their African ancestry using mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to children virtually unaltered.

A potential conflict between Jewish organizations and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over vicarious baptism was averted Monday when the church said that Simon Wiesenthal's name was removed from the church's genealogical records. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles had demanded earlier in the day that Wiesenthal's name be removed from the church's online International Genealogical Index, the church's database of posthumous "ordinances" or vicarious baptisms.

Pity the poor desk clerk at one Marina del Rey hotel. Sixty guests, all named Gerstenberger, are spending the week there after converging on Los Angeles as part of an unusual attempt to trace their ancestry back 800 years. It's the fourth time that the Gerstenbergers' "World Family Reunion" has united Gerstenbergers from Europe and North America. About 90 Gerstenbergers attended the first one, which was staged in the tiny hamlet that started it all: Gerstenberg, Germany.

Toni Scott packed the remnants of her family history into a plastic grocery bag -- dozens of tattered and sepia-toned photographs of mostly strangers, passed on to her by her deceased grandmother. With care, she pulled her baby book out of the bag and gently opened the brittle pages to show off her family tree. "Except for the name of his mother, my father's side of the tree is empty," said the 58-year-old Los Angeles special education teacher.