How It Works
The process, step by step: from the form to your result.
1. Request a kit
Fill in the short form with your name, email, postal address and country. That is all we ask for. You join a waitlist — kits go out first-come, first-served as donations come in.
2. Swab your cheek
The kit arrives by post with instructions. It is a simple cheek swab: no needles, no blood, a couple of minutes at your kitchen table.
3. Send it to the lab
You return the sample to the testing partner. Your sample goes to them directly — it never passes through us, and we never see or hold your DNA.
4. Explore your results
The partner produces your ancestry results. From request to results is typically a few weeks, though it depends on the post and on the laboratory.
What the kit reports
The test produces an ethnicity and ancestry estimate — including a Sephardic Jewish category, where it is detectable — along with DNA relative and cousin matches, which are often the most useful part for anyone building a family tree. It does not report health or medical information of any kind.
What it can and cannot tell you
We would rather set expectations correctly than have you disappointed. Sephardic ancestry is genuinely harder to detect than Ashkenazi ancestry: Sephardic Jews lived among the Iberian population for centuries and then, after the forced conversions, married into it for five hundred years more. The genetic signal is faint and the reference data is thinner. Small percentages can be statistical noise rather than a discovery.
Just as important: a low or absent result does not disprove your family story. A converso ancestor from the 1490s is fifteen to twenty generations back, and you may simply not have inherited detectable DNA from them. Our guide to Sephardic DNA testing explains this honestly and at length.
And the boundary that matters most: a result is a starting point for genealogical research. It is not legal proof of Jewish status, and it does not by itself establish eligibility under Israel's Law of Return or for Spanish or Portuguese citizenship. Those determinations belong to rabbinic, communal and governmental authorities.
Practical details
- Cost: free. There is no charge, and nothing to buy.
- Where we ship: worldwide. If we cannot reach your country, or the laboratory cannot, we will tell you rather than leave you waiting.
- How many: one kit per person by default, so that the available kits reach as many families as possible. If you want to request one for a relative as well, just ask — that is fine.
- How long: roughly a few weeks from request to results.
- Your data: we collect only what we need to post the kit, and we delete it afterwards. See our Privacy Policy and DNA Consent page.