Zalman Joffe of Kukliai - This person never existed.

Geoffrey, let's delete three quarters of Geni database since there are no hard evidence for their existence! Cool it off!

Geoffrey Sea. Fill in your own tree if you do not like the information do not use it. Stop harassing everyone. You would have to delete many of the biblical people. Did they exist? We don’t know. Fill in your own tree.

Yoseph, what information do you have that there was ever such a person as Zalman Joffe? No one yas yet given any shred of evidence.

Geoffrey Sea. Let’s see your tree. All you want to do is stir up trouble. You have no solutions or suggestions. You have no tree built. As I stated before many profiles could be deleted by your standard. Move along and build your tree. If you don’t like the information do not use it.

Geoffrey Sea
You joined Geni.com
June 3, 2021.

You have not created a tree.
Your two entries are private

So the question is,

Who are you and why are you attacking our families tree?

Are you related to us?
Have you spoken to our thousands of Cousins about your claims.
What is your issue with our family tree?

Geoffrey Sea, you've made a definitive claim but provided no evidence to back it up. I choose to believe oral history and shared DNA match interrelationships before I will ever believe someone like you who seems to have a personal mission to debunk the work of dozens of family researchers. Please stop taking the joy out of our pursuit of family history and find something else to focus your energies on.

If you believe this person to a "fake profile", I would suggest, just remove the profile from your tree. It would be impossible to actually prove someone existed in most cases due to lack of paper evidence or records. If you can prove its a fake, then please provide it.

Mike, Everyone connected to this individual has word of mouth confirmation from generations past that this person did exist. I see you work for Geni. Are you telling me that you will remove any profile that paper documentation cannot be provided for? Since most of this branch of family is pre 1800, will you be deleting all of connected profiles as well? And Mike, show me in your rules and regulations were people can be harassed with repeated emails and messages from non relatives that insisting profiles are fake. This is crossing the line and is not the way to handle profile authenticity. If this is your idea of collaboration, then GENI is probably not the site for me.

Mike,
If this member has a question, don't you think he should probably send a private message in a normal manor instead of being on the attack and being aggressively accusatory?
There is a proper way to communicate in the civilized world, and repeated messages with claims that profiles are "fake" and they need to be deleted is not the way to do it. Look at the responses from everyone on these discussion forums. I am not a professional genealogist and did not claim to be. I have a a regular job and do the family history thing as a hobby. If posting oral history is a prerequisite for using Geni, then make that known before using your site so people understand beforehand. Your average person is not a professional genealogist and is usually not comfortable with posting conversations with loved ones on public forums. However, there is a contact member option that should be used in these situations. If Mr Sea genuinely wanted to have dialogue, he would behave like an a respectful normal adult. By promoting this type of behavior, you are creating just another social media outlet for strangers to fight with one another. I know I speak for many members on here, if we are, at minimum receiving weekly messages with threats and accusations, I don't see the conversation going far with any resolutions. Please promote professional and respectful communication between members.
I think this is a general rule in life when you need to work with others.

Mike,

Mr. Sea has claimed that one of my ancestors is also "fake." She was born in 1553 and since I do not have documents verifying her existence, he sent me a rude email. Finding documents from the 16th century where they were extremely scarce to begin with is nigh impossible.

Genealogy has become my hobby. I am still learning and both enjoy and learn from other Geni users. There should be no place in Geni for harassment and unpleasant communication.

Not only has Zalman Joffe of Kukliai been determined to exist genealogically, as described extensively in the Overview section, but Y-chromosome DNA testing of living direct male descendants of his children show a common haplogroup and a common ancestor living at the appropriate time. Now to be fair, DNA nucleotides do not include the first or last names of their bearers. But the level of coincidence required for men who both genealogically and genetically trace to the same ancestor in the same time period and yet it is not the identified person (in this case Zalman), would be incredible. Incredible, as in its original meaning of "not believable."

Mr. Sea we have asked you many times what is YOUR evidence that the profiles are not real ?
No documentation does not make a profile fake.
In addition the profiles you have questioned have been added by many different people and added to Geni.com all different years. Why hasn’t other people protested these profiles?
What is your motivation? Why do you keep slandering Mr. Levine when other people have posted the profiles?
In addition we have Cousins whose DNA match the profiles in question. Also stated above by Alex you have not provided any sources or solutions. Besides biologically if they were not real some of us would not have been born.
I look forward to hearing from you.

Michael...we are talking about millions of SNPs tested (-:)...one descendent did a BigY test (FamilyTree DNA), which in addition to the SNP assessment includes 700 STRs, as you may know. Several (at least 5 I'm sure of) descendants had 37, 67 or 111 marker tests and all were close matches---genetic distances of 0-2. Technically it's possible the named ancestor in a tree is wrong---e.g. the common ancestor of a given set of Y-DNA matched descendants could have been the brother or paternal first cousin of the named ancestor. But again, that would be quite the coincidence, since especially with the more "famous" common ancestors, it was usually only the famous sibling who had extensive genealogical documentation....which in turn, is necessary for people to have discovered their linkage to that person.

On the autosomal front, there are literally---LITERALLY---hundreds of people who descend from this same major lineage and who match each other genetically (at Ancestry, MyHeritage, FTDNA etc.) at similar spots on the same chromosomes. While this does not address the validity of a particular specifically-named ancestor, it does show that there were common ancestors at different specific levels of genetic distance ---in other words, the common ancestor(s) at each generation HAD to have existed---so if they weren't who individuals whom people have traced back to, who were they? (see the last line of my paragraph above as it applies here as well.)

Hatte and Michael:

First of all, the YDNA indicates multiple descendants are in haplogroup J2a-Z6048-BY37931 (the last being the most recent terminal branch that includes all the Jews I believe are connected.) However, the known Kukla-Joffe descendants are on the sub-branches of BY37931 named Y37133--S24712. Hatte, is that what you were asking for or did I misunderstand your question?

Michael, you asked who the YDNA matches matched...yes, each other. The point is, you have several men---who were not previously known "cousins" to each other---who have traced their direct paternal lineage (son to father to father etc.) to a given ancestor and then when they undertook some YDNA testing, they all turned out to share the same YDNA lineage...which then becomes powerful evidence that they not only share a paternal ancestor but that this ancestor is the one on which their paternal line genealogies converge. The more people who do this testing...especially if they descend from even more distant common ancestors, the stronger this evidence becomes.

To key off of Hatte's comments re autosomal DNA...she's right that the amount of inherited DNA from a given ancestor diminishes with each generation and also that there is variation in how much DNA gets transmitted at each generation, so you can't always judge relationships from the exact amount (centimorgans "cm") you have in common with someone. Sometimes you share less than expected with a closer relative and more than expected with a more distant one.

Having said that, I have discovered over years of genetic genealogical analysis, that the common traces of an ancestor as far away as 10 generations do exist. (Originally I'd followed the conventional wisdom that a match of less than 100cms with blocks less than 20 cms wasn't likely to be worth pursuing...but that turns out to be very wrong if you are talking about people who share these long, deep, rabbinical lineage connections.)

There is dispute as to how "long" a generation should be...our ancestors married early so it might only be 15-20 years in some cases, yet there are plenty of times when a male ancestor was still fathering children in his 50s...and a female ancestor in her 40s. So I use an average of 25-35 years. Thus the range of years when there is still likely remaining autosomal DNA evidence from ancestors is roughly 250-350 years before the birth of the person doing the testing (1950 is a good average year for that). That puts the likely ancestral timeframe for the smaller segments at about 1600-1700 CE.

We cannot 100% prove a specific named ancestor from centuries ago IS the common ancestor---or the only common ancestor---between a set of people with autosomal DNA. But when many, many people----45 in several of my Kukla-Joffe lines!--- all share a similar segment of autosomal DNA and also have traced most of their lineages back quite far---and yet they only all match on one lineage.....well, I consider that to be powerful evidence that they share the common ancestor indicated.

I might add that paper trails are not 100% either....non-paternity events, outright "lies" by ancestors (usually for a good reason, but lies nevertheless) etc. all may make a "solid" paper trail less solid that it appears.

Hatte Anne Blejer IS THIS A DIFFERNT JOFFE FAMILY? In a word, yes. The very fact that so many haplogroups are involved in that project tells you that multiple paternal lines are represented and none of them who are in different haplogroups have a common ancestor in historical times (last few thousand years...in most cases, last 10,000+ years!) What is very possible is that many of these families are related, just not along a direct paternal line. As you may know, Jewish men would often take the names of in-laws, cousins etc. if the latter were famous or esteemed...or sometimes it was done for the more mundane reason of fooling czarist authorities.

Hatte Anne Blejer Regarding the Kukla-Joffe YDNA haplogroup---no, it is not in anyway officially decided/proven that Y37133--S2471 is the one and only "true" clade of the Joffe-Kukla line. For that to be the case we would need more than the 5-6 or so people who have tested thus far to also test and do so at high levels (111 markers or better yet SNP /BigY testing). What we have now is what I would call a strong set of evidence data based on those who have tested thus far who can claim a direct paternal descendance as far back as they have traced. If more people test and have the same results---OR if some test and have different results**---then we can move it to the realm of "proven fact." **you need several different results to cast doubt on the theory--only one person might be the result of hanky-panky. (-:

Mike Stangel Are you asking for genetic info that includes data from a descendant from the Joffe lineage from 16th century, but who has no Kukla-Kukliai connection? If so, it would have to be someone who descends from Rabbi Moredchai Joffe "HaLevush" or one of his brothers but it cannot be not a descendant of the Levush's son Rabbi Yehuda Arye Leib.

As far as I know, there is no such person who has done the DNA testing, although I'd be delighted to be proven wrong about this. The people I know about all trace on their paternal lines to the Levush via his son Rabbi Yehuda's son Abraham, born ca 1570, who moved to (and died in) Kukliai, Lithuania, although the GENI Master profile claims he died in Hebron. (but I don't see proof of that any more solid than the evidence he died in Lithuania) Regardless of where he died, his sons lived in Kukliai and so all their descendants are Kukla-Joffe folks, so to speak.

I'd love to see Y-DNA results for someone who is a direct male descendant of one of the Levush's other sons...e.g. Rabbi Peretz Jaffe, since based on what I see in trees his male descendants did not move anywhere near Kukliai....but I haven't found any such persons as yet. (His other sons are all listed on GENI as "undocumented" so their descendants wouldn't be as useful). If anyone finds a relevant male line descendant of a pre-Kukla Joffe lineage, I'd pay for the YDNA test!

Mike Stangel What I am saying is that DNA evidence thus far---both YDNA and autosomal---supports the existence of Zalman Joffe of Kukliai and his brothers....all of whom adopted the "of Kukle" or "Kuklya" or similar surnames.

Further, I don't see why finding a "pure" Joffe is necessary if the genetics and genealogy support the existence of Zalman, his siblings, his father etc. (in other words, this further testing---while it would be wonderful, don't get me wrong!) is not necessary to answer the issue that started this thread of whether the profile is "fake" or of an actual person.)

There are 36 people listed as managers of the profile of Zalman's gpa Rabbi Arye Leib...perhaps one of them is aware of a living descendant in the tree such as described above. I do not have time right now to contact all of them and search for such a person...and I presume you are not suggesting that this is what must be done to keep all the Joffe-Kuklas on GENI. That kind of standard would lead to the elimination of half the trees on the site!

However, if you want to find a "pure" Joffe ancestor who does not have any "Kukla-related" descendants...you would have to go back to Zalman's father (Abraham)'s brothers...or else Abraham's father Arye Leib's brothers, or the Levush's brothers...and then, to do a YDNA test, you'd need to trace down a direct male line to a living male descendant. So far I have not found such a person, but if you or Hatte or someone else knows of them, as I said before, I'd be open to paying for a YDNA test.

One factor here is the fertility of the Kukla-Joffe lineage...there are a gazillion descendants as the autosomal DNA testing has shown. The other lineages from the Levush (and his ancestors) are not so fertile...or at least, far fewer living descendants realize their genealogical heritage. For example, out of hundreds of thousands of autosomal matches (I've tested everywhere on the planet!), I've yet to find one that has the "pure Joffe" heritage lines I referred to above. I'm sure they exist.