About us
FamilyTreeDNA estimates that ancestor of R-FGC14628 (also known as R-Y11410 on Full) originated approximately 1500 years ago, although this estimate will almost certainly change as more potential testers take the Y-700 test. Although we will probably never know the name of the common paternal ancestor of all the men in the group, together we can figure out how the descendants of one man who lived in Antiquity traveled throughout the world—from West Asia, to Iberia, and to North Africa, Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe, and to the Americas.
The descendant branch R-FGC14600 is a slightly different story however. Because of the widespread use of the surname Spira or variants thereof (Speyer, Spear, Spier, Shapiro, etc.) among the descendants of the R-FGC14600 founder, the project administrators believe that he was likely Shlomo Spira, the medieval patriarch of the Spira rabbinic family and (through his daughter) the Luria rabbinic family. Our goal is to use the genetic and genealogical research to determine whether this hypothesis is correct.