Today will be a bit solipsistic; so be it.

Yesterday, after I posted a picture of my dad that I’d never seen before, some kind readers went into ancestry.com and retrieved more information about the Coyne genealogy, most of which was new to me. I’m not going to bore you with all the details, but the most interesting one is that my last name came from Ireland, and has been “Coyne” at least since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The big mystery is whether the Irish Coynes were Jewish or not. Some of this info came from Ancestry.com, other bits from my cousin Jeff.

A bit of background: when I wrote WEIT, I had my Y chromosome tested to see if it was from the Kohanim tribe, the priestly “caste” of Jews. I was absolutely sure that, sometime in the last century and a half, my ancestors were named Cohan or Cohen—a Jewish name—and changed it at Ellis Island to sound less Jewish.

Well, the DNA from the Y chromosome turned out not to be the characteristic Y of the Kohanim. This priestly duty is passed from father to son, and there is a characteristic kohanim Y chromosome that identifies them. Like surnames, Y chromosomes are passed from father to son, and so if I was one of the high-class Kohanim, a genetic test would tell me. (Curiously, I don’t believe in any of that religious stuff, but I wanted to find out as a way to get into evolution as the genealogy of ALL LIFE. That would be the intro to my first book, but I ditched it.) Well, it turned out I was a fake Cohen: all Kohanim are named Cohen or Cohan or Cohane, but not all Cohens and the like are Kohanim. That’s because many Jews took the name Cohen to pretend they were of that caste.  But my Y did show that I was Eastern European Jewish, which comported with what I knew of my ancestry. And it also meant that every one of my patrilineal ancestors named Coyne must also have been Jewish, because they had the Jewish Y that was passed on to me.

Here is the strange part, though: the genealogy that one of my relatives put on Ancestry.com:

More background, some of which comes from my second cousin Jeffrey Coyne: my father, and his late sister Madeline, were the products of the marriage of Joseph Coyne (who ran an auto parts store in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and was fairly well off) and a woman named Florence Bloom.  Shortly after my father was born, his mother got the Spanish flu from the great epidemic in 1918, and died. (My father never knew his mother.) His father later remarried a much younger woman, Rose Keanan, and they had a son, Jack—my father’s half brother. My father was apparently poorly treated by Rose, and he and his sister were raised largely by their grandmother Pauline.  Joseph then lost every cent he had in the 1929 stock market crash, and, after he converted to Christian Science, he and Rose moved to Miami in the early 1930s, where Joseph died of a heart attack at 57 or 58. Rose remarried five or six times, and apparently remained a “hard drinking and bitter woman.” My father and his sister stayed in Pennsylvania.

Apparently because of the abusive way his step-mother treated him, and issues around the probate process when Joseph died, my father and Jack didn’t speak for decades—until they met again when I was a postdoc in Davis, California. (Jack lived nearby in Sacramento.) About 15 years ago I was contacted by Jack’s son Jeffrey, who taught law at Duke and also did private legal work, and he furnished me with some of the family history. (I believe all the information an Ancestry.com came from him.)

My paternal grandfather Joseph was Jewish, for his mother was Jewish: Pauline Zoffer, born in 1856 in Germany. Here’s the manifest of the ship Schiller when she came to the US in 1858, arriving with her mother and brothers Solomon and Heinrich (her age is given as five, so I’m not sure about the disparity; also, I was told by Jeffrey that Pauline’s father Isadore was also on the ship , though the manifest doesn’t show that).

Here’s the 1920 census showing my dad’s family at that time. Pauline Zoffer, his grandmother, is listed as residing at the home, including Joseph, his son Floyd (my dad), and my aunt Madeline (my dad’s sister). Apparently Joseph hadn’t yet remarried two years after his wife died in 1918:

As the diagram at the top shows, Pauline married Peter Coyne, born in New York in 1862. There used to be an announcement online of my paternal great-grandparents’ wedding in Brooklyn, and it was a small piece titled “Jewish wedding”, announcing that Peter and Pauline were married at a synagogue.  (Sadly, that announcement is no longer there, but I remember it.) That comports with Pauline’s religion, but what about Peter’s?  Jeff tells me that their marriage “caused a rift within the Zoffer family” because Pauline married a gentile, and that would mean that my name wasn’t Jewish—wasn’t changed from “Cohen” or “Coyne”. But if that’s the case, why do I have a Y chromosome showing Eastern European Jewish ancestry. For that would mean that Peter himself was not of complete gentile ancestry, but that his Y was Eastern European Jewish. (I have his Y.)

It is a mystery. Peter’s parents were Patrick and Catherine Coyne, with Patrick born in 1823 and Catherine in 1831, both in IRELAND. And Patrick’s parents were John and Ann Coyne, both Irish, too, with John born in 1803 in Galway and Ann born in 1805 in Ireland (no city specified). My name, and my Y chromosome, goes straight back to John W. Coyne.

Already, then, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the name “Coyne” was still “Coyne”, and perhaps it was never “Cohan” or a variant therefore. All this time I’ve been telling people that my name was changed from something like “Cohan,” which was simply a guess.

While there is a small Jewish community in Ireland around Galway, there are also plenty of pure Irish Coynes. So I have no idea if my name was changed from something else, was always “Coyne”, and whether “Coyne” was even a Jewish name. Was the wedding in Brooklyn a “mixed” one? Why do I have a Jewish Y chromosome if my paternal great-grandfather was a gentile?

Although I’m an atheist, according to Jewish law I’m considered Jewish since my mother (the other side of the family) was 100% Jewish: the daughter of David and Sadie Frank, Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe respectively.  But the source of my name, and of my Y chromosome, remains a mystery. Was “Peter Coyne” really Jewish and pretending to be a gentile, explaining why the “mixed” marriage really wasn’t mixed, even though it’s said to have angered my great-grandmother’s relatives?

Who knows? I’ll do some more digging when I have time. And maybe I’ll take a full DNA test (only Ys and mtDNA were available ten years ago).