Welcome to the Christensen family DNA project! The objective of this project is to use documentary and genetic genealogy (DNA) to determine a potential ancestor that was of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. Several of the descendants of Christian and Frederikke Christensen have a trace amount of Ashkenazi Jewish showing up in their "ethnicity estimates" from Ancestry and 23 and Me.  The family is known to be from Denmark.

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Ashkenazi Jews are a Jewish diaspora population from the Holy Roman Empire around the end of the 1st Millenium. Their traditional language is Yiddish, with Jewish linguistic elements, that developed during the Middle Ages after they had moved from Germany and France into Northern Europe and Eastern Europe. For centuries, Ashkenazim in Europe used only Hebrew as their language.  Widely persecuted in the late middle ages, the majority of this population shifted eastward, moving out of the Holy Roman Empire into the areas that later became part of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, these areas today comprise parts of present-day Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.

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We are looking for descendants of this family who are willing to share their DNA results to help us in our search to determine this ancestor.  We are also open to any information that you may have on this family through sources and/or family stories.  If you descend from the tree below, you may be able to assist with this project.

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