Stern

This page gathers existing information that was on my (David Stern's) website about the Stern family as well as new information we are adding. We hope to organize it better in the future!

• The eulogy, or hesped, my brother read at my mother's funeral.

• Blogposts by my brother on family history and on my father.

• Blogpost by distant relative Amy Cohen on the children of Salamon Stern including Adolf Stern and his son Siegfried, my grandfather.

• There are a couple of well-known German-Jewish Stern families in the New York area. One family who founded the Stern Brothers Department Stores and Bear Stearns bank came from the same village as us in Germany. They are descended from Maier Abraham Stern who was the brother of my great-great-grandfather Salomon Stern. The Stern School of Business at NYU is named for Leonard Stern who is my third cousin and is related to us through his mother. His father Max Stern (a different Stern family!) founded the Hartz Mountain pet supply business.

• Continuing the academic theme, Erika Fromm was my father's cousin. Her grandson, Michael Greenstone is an economics professor at the University of Chicago. So he's my second cousin once removed.

• Some pictures of my ancestors. A couple of these pictures are included in a website on Jewish life in Hessen before the Holocaust developed by the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt. Also included are Sydney and Ivy Browne, my Australian grandparents and my parents, Gunther Stern and Ruth Leah Stern.

• Some scanned images from my father's German passport from the late 1930's.

• Photographs from the Jewish Cemetery in Ziegenhain where the Stern Family came from. Close ups of tombstones that Rafi Stern took in 1987. New photos that Robin Stanley took in October 2023.

• David Stern took a Y-DNA test with Family Tree DNA. This should be able to accurately find more remote paternal line relatives. There were 32 exact matches (on 37 short-tandem repeat (STR) markers). Of those with family trees, only one appeared to have a paternal ancestor in Germany, in Rheinland-Pfalz. The others lead back mostly to Poland and Ukraine in the 18th Century. This suggests that the male ancestor of the Sterns of Ziegenhain came from there too in the 17th or early 18th Centuries. We identified 14 towns including Ziegenhain that ancestors of matches came from. These are focused on NW Ukraine:

  

• Robin Stanley, David and Rafi's 5th cousin, also took the test. He had two differences from David in the number of repeats. All of David's exact matches are two genetic steps from him and he has no exact matches. Given this, we conclude that Baer Mendel Stern is likely to be the ancestor of David, Rafi, and Robin but Robin's branch of the Stern family experienced two Y-DNA mutations since Baer Mendel Stern.

• Using just 12 STRs, there were also matches with Arab men in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. There were Jews in pre-Islamic Arabia. Possibly, these are their descendants, putting our common ancestor at around 2,000 years ago. Alternatively, hypothetically, these could be descendants of converts to Islam in Israel who later migrated to Arabia. If Ashkenazim migrated to Italy at a late date, the common ancestor could be around 1,300 years ago. Otherwise, the common ancestor could be much deeper in the past before the formation of the Jewish people.

• Stern Family Tree.

| Home | Australia | Germany | DNA | Updates |