Sophia Pennamacoor (Ernst) - Sophie Edwards and DNA matching

correction: "battle of Waterloo" should more lily be "battle of Leipzig"

This is very interesting. My great grandfather, Abraham Isaac Pennamacoor was a Sephardic Jew of Portuguese descent. He was born in Amsterdam in 1826 and emigrated to New York in 1863. At that time he was married to Jane, but she died in 1871 or thereabouts. Abraham remarried Sophia Ernst in 1872. She was my great grandmother, and one of her sons, Joseph, is my grandfather. So far as I know, Sophie was also Jewish, and certainly we are still a Jewish family. I don't have a ton of info about Sophie, but what I have indicates that she was born in Bavaria in 1844 and came to the US in 1870, and that her parents were Simon Ernst and Jane Ernstaul. Here is a link to my Ancestry tree https://www.ancestry.com/invite-ui/accept?token=FnWhFW3HoxDhrkw8gED...=

interesting.

My mother's side of the family were Ashkenazi Jews, however passed-down the oral history of the family was that one ancestor "Arnold Friedrich Ernst" was a German army officer who married into our Jewish family.

When I investigated the records closely however, it seemed to reveal that the oral history was slightly off and it was rather Arnold's father Josef who was the non-Jewish army officer who married in to the family and that Arnold was half-Jewish. As a young man Arnold served Dutch infantry (not German) and then he bounced from address to address in the "Joden Houttuinen" of Amsterdam so that doesn't align and with being a German army office. Also the dates were wrong. It seems like that when his daughter married into my van Dam family ancestors from Dordrecht, Arnold and his daughter wanted to hide that history and changed the story. In fact my mother insisted I had it wrong and that the Ernsts were from Dordrecht - but the records proved otherwise.

The whole story of a non-Jewish army officer marrying into a Jewish family in early 1800s sounded quite surprising however the names Arnold Friedrich Ernst and Josef Ernst do sound typically non-Jewish German. My DNA supports that too as 3 ethnicity analyses estimate me at around 48% Ashklenazi, 2% German (the remainder being Danish which doesn't overlap much)

Thanks. I am not sure where this takes us in terms of how we are connected, but it seems as if there is something there. It must have been quite a shonda for an intermarried couple in those days. Is it possible that a nice Jewish boy changed his name to join the army?