My Strange and Fascinating Travels Around My Far-Reaching Family Tree

In a bid to find out about my Sephardic roots, I am uncovering new relations and tying together surprising stories

In 2015, a year before the disastrous referendum in the UK that would eventually rip our European citizenship from us come the end of 2020, the Portuguese government made an announcement.

I wasn’t aware of the announcement they had made until a couple of years ago, and then only stored it in a special compartment in my brain marked “for later.” But now, I have dug it out to revisit.

You see, as many Brits who opposed leaving the EU felt, taking away our European rights was not only a disaster for the economy of Britain, but it also stripped us of the freedoms I had grown up with and enjoyed to the max — freedom of movement throughout EU member nations and the ability to live, work, and buy property in Europe. Freedoms and rights my own children were now being denied for their lifetimes.

Many Brits who didn’t want to lose these freedoms looked for opportunities to become citizens of European countries. We learnt that my dad was automatically considered a citizen of Ireland since his mother was born in Dublin. And thus, both my sister and I could apply for Irish citizenship too.

But that opportunity wasn’t available for the next generation. It stopped at us. And that felt decidedly unfair to our children.

But then the Portuguese decision from 2015 came to light — the announcement of a “right to return” for all descendants of Sephardic Jews who had been forced to convert or flee in the fifteenth century during the Spanish Inquisition. And since we knew we definitely had Sephardi in our bloodline, and both Moroccan and Portuguese origin was murmured in discussion about this great-great grandfather of mine with the Sephardic surname, we wondered if this was something we could explore.

Back in 2022, when I first learnt about it, it seemed like such an impossibly difficult mission to take on that I put it at the back of my mind for another time. But on New Year’s Day this year, when the topic happened to be mentioned while on a walk with friends, my daughter begged me to look further into it with her.

And so, that day, we began searching genealogy records and family trees to find any information we could about our Sephardic bloodline.

In fact, we delved deeper than we really needed to, since we thought we needed to prove that our ancestors originated very specifically from Portugal. Apparently that’s not the case since it’s so hard to prove all the way back to the 1400s. We simply need to prove they were of Sephardic origin, from either Spain or Portugal, and we know they definitely are that.

But because I was searching far and deep, signing up to different genealogy database websites for paid subscriptions and free trials, I found all sorts of incredible treasures.

One of the most uplifting moments of this journey was when I typed into Google the name of my Moroccan-born great-great-grandfather and the city where he lived in England — Solomon Amselem, Liverpool — and came upon a beautiful poem and essay.

It was called Veiled Grace, and the author was a woman called Cathy Wilson, who it seems was also a great-great-granddaughter of Solomon Amselem. But since I had nothing other than a PDF of it at the time, I realised that finding the author could prove challenging.

What I did have were the few words at the top:

Printed in The Searcher, Vol. 52, №4 (Fall 2015): 143, 144, 146. GENEii Category 1 Honorable Mention

And after some more searches online, I struck gold. I found the history writing contest that this had won an honourable mention for, along with the names of the winning authors, and the towns in the US they were from. Bingo!

A little bit more searching and I found the Cathy Wilson I was looking for on both Facebook and LinkedIn — an artist and a writer. I sent her a Facebook message but I knew that she may not be notified since we weren’t already connected and my message would go into her message requests. After a couple of days of waiting and hearing nothing, I went back to her profile and realised I was able to comment on her posts, so I did.

Within a few hours, I received a friend request from her followed by a string of messages. The next couple of hours was truly exciting as we compared the information we had about hour respective great-grandmothers, sisters and both daughters of Solomon. She told me about her nine children — all given names from our shared bloodline — and her twelve grandchildren. I shared the details of my grandmother Edith, cousin of her grandmother Ethyl though they never met, and how my great-grandmother had chosen to have nothing to do with her dark-skinned Moroccan father.

I shared how Edith had six children and eighteen grandchildren — all of whom were Cathy’s third cousins. And that would only have been a tiny section of Cathy’s many relatives here in the UK and Ireland.

After a lovely couple of hours, we left it that we would pass on contact details to our nearest and dearest, and she would let me know when she was publishing her memoir, from where the essay I had originally found was taken.

The next interesting revelation was when my father and I were searching records together and we tried to patch together stories that his mother had told him.

She, in fact, had never met her grandfather Solomon, since her mother had despised him and his Moroccan origin so much. This I put down to good old British racism, which, back in the late nineteenth century, would have been rife among the white-skinned English.

Worse, she never even knew he was from Morocco, which I assume her mother was embarrassed to tell her. My grandmother was always under the impression that he had been born in Portugal and had come to England from there. In fact, the Portugal part of his bloodline may be based on reality but the Moroccan part was dropped from the story she heard.

But there was more.

My father recalled his mother telling him a story of someone from her family leaving England in the rise of the Zionist dreams of returning to The Promised Land. It was at the time that many Jews were escaping the pogroms of Russia, persecution across Europe, and the general rise of the Nazis in Germany, and heading for Palestine. Caught in the rising enthusiasm, he too set out for Palestine, by now in his seventies or so, with a dream to live the last years of his life back in the Holy Land.

This was just prior to the First World War when Palestine was still ruled by the Ottoman Empire, what we now call Turkey. But then the war broke out and the Turks were on the side of the Germans, taking any Jewish intruders they could as war prisoners. And Solomon’s fate landed him not in Paradise but in prison in the Holy Land.

As far as we know, that is where his life sadly ended, in a Turkish jail in Safed, Palestine, now Tzfat, Israel.

His widow, my great-great-grandmother Rebecca, remarried a wealthy man and lived until the 1930s.

The latest discovery was an entire line of Amselems, all going back from Solomon as far as his great-great-grandfather, born in 1715 in Larache, Morocco, as were all the Amselems until both Solomon and his father left for greener pastures. And since Solomon had no siblings, that is where the Amselem story ends in Morocco. His father, Joseph, went to Ireland and is buried somewhere in Dublin.

At this point we were still under the impression that we needed to prove the Portuguese-specific connection, hence the search that took us that far back.

But, in this search, I also discovered many other bloodlines I never knew I had, with ancestors going all the way back to 1685 in France, as well as Polish, Lithuanian and Prussian ancestry.

There was even an ancestor called Isodoro from Surinam.

And that’s just on my father’s side!

In addition, I discovered more third cousins here in the UK, one of whom I have reached out to but have yet to hear back.

I haven’t gone as far as doing a DNA test. I’m not sure I can take any more information about my family genealogy for the moment. But thus far has been fun, enlightening, and truly heart-warming to have met my newly discovered fellow writer of a third cousin in California, Cathy.

Perhaps one day I will take a trip to visit her. But first I have another mission that may take me to Larache, Morocco to search out the birth and death records of our ancestors.

In which case, I will have much more to tell her by the time I get there.