My mother's ancestry is 100% German Jewish (maternal Hesse, paternal
Rhineland) well-documented to the early 1700s and before on some lines. 
And yet, everywhere my mother has tested, including Ancestry, 23andMe,
and FTDNA, she has many matches without any known German ancestry.

Ancestry is the most accurate in terms of identifying closer matches,
but even so, I see matches > 100 cM -- she's got over 200 of them on
Ancestry -- that don't appear to have German ancestry.

I think there are only two possibilities for these DNA matches:

* They date back to the 1500s/1600s when many German Jews were expelled
from their towns.  (The DNA suggests that some of my mother's ancestors
may have been in Galicia in the 1500s -- 1000 miles east of their German
towns.)

* The matches have German ancestry from the 1700s/1800s but  lack records.

I'd love to figure it out!

JoAnne
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JoAnne Goldberg - Menlo Park, California

BLOCH, SEGAL, FRIDMAN, KAMINSKY, PLOTNIK/KIN -- Siauliai, LIthuania