Are we Jewish or not?

It seemed like I may have had a solution to my question after learning the Kapple/Kappel Koppel's male line DNA Haplo type was J2. Since many Jewish males have that haplo type, and our surname is associated with Ashkenazi Jews, I felt like the question was answered. I received an email from the Burgenland Bunch DNA study a few days ago with some analysis of the group results to date. The J2's in my families village area tend to be related to Aromun/Illyrian, which would mean they are from the Balkans or Greece. I will eventually upgrade my cousin Darryl's test kit to narrow down the sub group. My cousin's ultimate SNP is likely going to be around M241 which could be Balkan? It also may be semitic if it's L25? More testing may clarify.

It's interesting that most of my cousin's matches are Spanish. This may change after testing more markers. I sorted out my Family Finder matches separating my mother's side from my father's. I was very surprised to find I had a match on my father's side and they had hispanic roots. My father has no hispanic roots that I am aware of?

It is interesting that Northern Burgenlanders are more Germanic than those of the south, where my family is from. It does look like my Burgenland family is a mix of ethnicities. I have some Hungarian matches on my father's side. 

Considering my mother's Middle Eastern results were just Mozabite and mine included Palestinian; it's possible that the Palestinian is from my father? I'll upgrade the test when I have a chance and see if it can provide anymore insight?

Irish Relatives Drunk in Public?

Failing to pay the Poor Rate could land you in court as with Thomas and Stephen Huane. I believe they abandoned their property in Ireland.

It seems my Irish relatives in Mayo, Ireland weren't teetotalers. I used my Find My Past free trial to look at their court records collection. I was not able to determine whether my Mullen ancestors appeared in court due to the fact the Galway court records are not set up like the Mayo records. Not enough detail on the Galway side to establish the identity of someone with a common name.
The surname Huane is so uncommon and limited to a small area in Ireland, so it was easy to spot our family court records. The Huanes appeared in court a number of times; generally after having a few too many. Some of our Irish female ancestors were known to have a hair trigger temper (I would say that we generally tell the truth and people think it is hell, as Truman once said). We can see all of the rumors about the family verified in the records. Happily no one was ever seriously hurt in some of these skirmishes; Praise be to God!

Sounds like this may have been mutual combat, and charges were dropped

Most of the Huane court appearances had to do with the following circumstances; "Defendant were found drunk on the public road contrary to law."

This court case helped me to identify the location of my ancestors property. Griffith's Valuation of Ireland gave me an approximate location for Thomas Huane's property. Thomas Huane's cow strayed onto a neighbors property, and he sued because of this. The neighbor's property was in another townland, which leads me to believe Thomas Huane's land was located on the Townland boundary line with Bunduff. These records are interesting, and add to our knowledge of  the lives family members.

Backtracking and DNA Analysis

My Pie Chart

My Mother's DNA test results finally came in yesterday. It has caused me to rethink my previous conclusions. I had assumed since my father's surname was likely Jewish that all of my middle eastern came through his side of the family. My Mother, however, has even more Middle Eastern than I do.

My Mother Edna Forgey -Kapple's ethnic breakdown

My mother's Middle Eastern result of 18% leads me to believe that it is possible I may have inherited only 5% of my Middle Eastern from my father. As we can see with my Native American result the percentages go down by about half with each generation. I had heard that happens but now I see my mother's about 11% and my 5%.
According to my mother's population result she is 18% Mozabite. According to my result my Middle Eastern is Bedouin, Mozabite, Palestinian
My mother has 232 total matches. I have 219 matches. We share 93 common matches. So far I've found a Nicaraguan 3rd to 5th cousin match in my mother's match list. I've also found a Zirkle/Roush relative who is a match. to her but not me. I am happy that my mother shared even more DNA with a descendant of John Forgey of Tennessee which supports our inference that we are related. Stop and start places are not exact so it's a little hard to establish there actual location.

My mother Edna Kapple and Marion Kerr

My comparison with Marion

Comparing my confirmed 5th cousin Nan with my mother I get different numbers at FTDNA than I do at gedmatch. According to FTDNA their largest shared segment is 12.73(which is exactly what Nan and I share). According to Gedmatch it's 16 on Chromo 2 and 15 for me?  Who's right?

Nan and I

Nan Harvey and Edna Forgey-Kapple

I am making a list of the matches which fall on my father's side. FTDNA provides in common with match list, and a not in common with list. I downloaded the excel spreadsheet for these lists. I will note which matches are my mother's and which could be my father's, for all the lists then merge them.

Here is a comparison of Dodecad 13b charts between my mother and I:

Annette Kapple 

Edna Kapple

Family Tree Maker vs RootsMagic Software

Right off the bat I have to say I would not recommend purchasing Family Tree Maker 2014, which just came out a few weeks ago, until it's fixed. It's going to take some time for them to work out several problems with the new version. 

I decided to purchase the 2014 version of Family Tree Maker because of the ability it gives you to sync your online tree with your personal software on your computer. I had spent many hours attaching and uploading information to that tree since 2010. I wanted to have a personal copy of it. You can download a gedcom of your tree, but that doesn't include media. I had been using Rootsmagic since 2010 as my personal genealogy software. Before Rootsmagic I used PAF which is similar but has fewer features.
Since I have some experience now using both softwares I decided to compare some of the features I use most often here:
First of all starting the program there is a difference in the time it takes for them to load. Rootsmagic generally loads immediately. Family Tree Maker never loads quickly. It can take between 1 to 3 minutes to load, and other times won't load at all? Family Tree Maker is also prone to freezing up while you are using it.
Looking at the primary screen Family Tree Maker lays out a great deal of data on one page, which can be useful when it comes to analyzing your data.

You can see that the primary page for Rootsmagic is much less busy. You can click on the tabs across the top to see family groups etc.. I prefer the less busy screen of Rootsmagic.

One thing I would change about RootsMagic is the dialog box that comes up when you want to import a file or Photos. I use date and name search to look for files on my computer. It is time consuming trying to locate a file without that feature in the dialog box.

The hated no search dialog box at Rootsmagic

The preferred Family Tree Maker searchable dialog box

Another place where Family Tree Maker shines is with their media viewer. You can flip through your images and look at them in the media viewer. You can only view one image at a time with Rootsmagic. You can scroll through thumbnails of your images at Rootsmagic. When you want to see them at a larger size you have to click on each one individually. The resolution of the image isn't as sharp at Rootsmagic either.

You can see the difference when you compare this image from Rootsmagic with the FTM viewer below

Family Tree Maker media viewer

My primary reason for using genealogy software is to keep a record of my research so I can refer back to it, which I often do, during my research process. Another way I enjoy using the software is generating books and charts to share with family. I like the Rootmagic book generating feature better than Family Tree Maker. The FTM book generating process is more clumsy and time consuming. Rootsmagic takes all of the facts you've imputed for each individual ancestor and creates a narrative summary of with these facts. You can produce a narrative report which includes all your ancestors, very quickly, and includes notes. Family Tree Maker Smart Stories produces a better narrative with the facts in your database. It sounds less computer generated; plus, you can type info to the report. The only problem is you have to create a smart story for each ancestor then combine the stories using the publish book feature. Since I would like to include a couple hundred narratives this might be time consuming.

This is the narrative generated by Rootsmagic

Smart Story Family Tree Maker

Rootsmagic produces a very attractive scrapbook. I have not found this feature at Family Tree Maker.

Page produced with Rootsmagic scrapbook.

In closing, I now have two genealogy software programs on my computer (plus still have paf). I think I'll be using features from both to create a book. I might use the comprehensive narrative report from Rootsmagic, and the Smart Story from Family Tree Maker for ancestors I want more indepth stories for. I would also use some of the Scrapbook pages from Rootsmagic. Since Rootsmagic opens faster I would probably refer to it more during research. I will be using the syncing feature at Family Tree maker if they can get it working properly. The FamilySearch tree access at Rootsmagic is also a useful feature. You can compare your tree with FamilySearch's tree and add any information you don't already have. Having several genealogy programs is nice, I can use the best features of  all of them.