DNA a new tool in researching family history.

Byline: GENEALOGY By Mark Baker The Register-Guard

Bennett Greenspan began looking for his ancestors as a junior high school student in Omaha, Neb., in 1964.

Four decades later, he has helped thousands try to locate missing links in their family trees by simply swabbing the inside of their cheeks. Not that he does that himself, he just sends you a kit.

"I certainly think this is going to become mainstream for genealogists," Greenspan says from Houston, where he runs Family Tree DNA, the company he founded in 1999 after hitting a roadblock in his own family tree research.

Greenspan will speak Tuesday at Temple Beth Israel during a general meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of the Willamette Valley.

The society has joined the campaign of Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem-based organization that compiles a database of Holocaust victims. Although 3.1 million names have been listed, millions more have not, according to the society. More than 300,000 new names were listed last year.

"I'm very excited about it," says Renee Gottesman, the society's vice president, of Greenspan's upcoming talk. "I think it's going to be very enlightening."

Lots of local Jews are still trying to trace their ancestry and find relatives who might have died in the Holocaust or before, says Gottesman, including her husband, Andrew Gottesman, whose grandfather was murdered in the Ukraine in about 1919 or 1920.

Although Andrew Gottesman had his DNA tested by Family Tree DNA, it has not provided much of a link between his grandfather and the missing holes in their family tree, Renee Gottesman says.

"We don't know anything about his family," she says of the grandfather. "We don't even know where he was born. We've had some bites, but I need to know what the (DNA) results mean. I need to pick Bennett's brain. So for us, this is an ideal way to be able to make a real attempt to connect in some way."

The numbers of Holocaust survivors, their relatives and those who recall anything from that era are dwindling every day, Renee Gottesman says. So it's important that anyone who has information come forward, she says.

"Some people are actually finding living relatives who they thought had died long ago," she says. "What we're finding locally is that there are a lot of people who didn't realize they had Jewish ancestry."

Advances in science and technology, coupled with the growth of the Internet, has led to an explosion in genetic genealogy. Greenspan's company is one of several that tests DNA for a price. About 82,000 people have been directly tested through Family Tree DNA, says Greenspan, whose company charges from $75 to $839, depending on the test. The company generated $5 million in sales in 2005, according to a story last year in The New York Times.

Greenspan says his company has also tested an additional 180,000 people as part of National Geographic's five-year Genographic Project, an attempt to trace mankind's migrations across the planet throughout human history.

"They really helped put this on the map," he says of the nonprofit society choosing Family Tree DNA to do the testing for the project.

Customers send in two DNA samples (one for you and a presumed relative) and discover within a few weeks if a genetic match has been found, according to the company's Web site, www.familytreedna.com.

One of the tests that Family Tree DNA performs, for the "Cohanim" gene, is of particular interest to Jewish genealogists. The Cohanim (plural of "Cohen") are the priestly family of the Jewish people, members of the Tribe of Levi, and all are believed to be descendants of one man, Aaron, the brother of Moses, according to University of Arizona biotechnology research scientist Michael Hammer, who is also Family Tree DNA's chief scientist.

Family Tree DNA often logs test results into different "surname" projects. What DNA testing often shows is that people with the same last name often are not related, says Greenspan, who tested 40 men with the same last name as his and found that only 17 or 18 had the same unique DNA signature.

"We are at absolute infancy of all of this," he says. "We have a storybook within us that we carry in our DNA."

IT'S IN YOUR DNA

What: Meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of the Willamette Valley with talk on how to use DNA testing to trace your family's history

Who: Bennett Greenspan, founder of Family Tree DNA

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Temple Beth Israel, 2550 Portland St.