Lineage

In February and March 2026 he reconstructed his family tree from public records — obituaries in the Imperial Valley Press and McCook Gazette, Find a Grave, FamilySearch and WikiTree trees, the Volga German colony censuses, Santee Agency rolls and Dakota War records, Quebec parish registers, and the vital indexes of Nebraska, Wyoming, Missouri and Illinois — then broke the one brick wall the public record could not with two Imperial County death certificates the family had kept. Living relatives appear here by first name only.

The tree

Parents: Steve Davis, of Davis Hay Co., and Mary Davis, née Siegel — the middle name he carries.
Grandparents, paternal: Jim (James) Davis and Carole Davis, née Bedwell, of Seeley in the Imperial Valley. Jim served in Army Special Forces in the late 1950s, most likely with the 10th Special Forces Group at Bad Tölz; his father and grandfather were among the families who built the Imperial Valley.
Grandparents, maternal: William Louis "Bill" Siegel (1927, Stratton, Nebraska – 2015, Morrill) — a WWII Marine, agronomist, co-founder of Jirdon Agri Chemicals, radio host and inductee of the Nebraska Hall of Agricultural Achievement — and Esther Siegel, née Schwartzkopf (1927, McGrew – 2016, Morrill), whose purchase of Green River fossil tile from Wyoming put anthropology in front of him as a child and started the family's museum habit.
Great-grandparents: Howard Davis and Ruby Yvonne Davis, née Trudell (1916, Rawlins, Wyoming – 2007, Nampa, Idaho), married in Yuma; Robert Ethan Bedwell Sr. (c. 1897–1958) and Era Sadie Bedwell, née Gray (1901–1981), of Brawley; Dr. Frederick Lewis Siegel (1894–1967), the Stratton dentist, and Wilma Pauline Siegel, née Kuhns (1899–1999); David F. Schwartzkopf, born January 6, 1899 in the Umët (Rosenberg) colony on the Volga, Saratov, Russia, and Katie Schwartzkopf, née Gettman.
Great-great-grandparents: James H. Davis (1871, Missouri – 1932, El Centro) and Mary Ellen Davis, née Williams (1883, Illinois – 1956, Brawley) — the Davis line past Howard was a brick wall in every public source until two Imperial County death certificates in the family's keeping, annotated by hand, settled it; George Jacob Schwartzkopf and Maria Katharina Kindsvater, both born in the Volga colonies around 1863–64.
Deeper: John Davis and Betty Hostler, both born in Missouri; Moses L. Trudell (c. 1852); Francis "Frank" Perron dit Trudell (c. 1803, Quebec – 1881, Nebraska) and Mary Iciyapewin (b. c. 1816, Minnesota Territory), a Mdewakanton Dakota of the Santee Sioux; Hans George Zinn (1753, Darmstadt – 1826, Philippi, West Virginia); Jacob Balthasar Schwartzkopf, born December 19, 1721 in Pfaffenhofen, Württemberg, who arrived in the Dönhof colony on the Volga on July 21, 1766 (household 41 in the 1767 census); the Pfrimmer line out of Alsace. Twelve generations on the longest branches.

Where they came from

Welsh and British Isles, by way of Missouri and Illinois: Davis, Williams, Gray, Bedwell: the pioneer corridor that ended in the Imperial Valley.
French-Canadian and Métis: Perron dit Trudell, from Quebec parish records of the 1600s through the fur trade to Minnesota and Nebraska.
Santee Sioux — Mdewakanton Dakota: Mary Iciyapewin, imprisoned at Fort Snelling with her children during the 1862 Dakota War while her husband served in the U.S. Army; on paper, one sixty-fourth of him.
Volga German: Schwartzkopf: Württemberg to Catherine the Great's colonies in 1766, a hundred and thirty-some years on the Volga, out of Russia in the pogrom years, into the Nebraska panhandle by 1921.
Hessian and Alsatian: Zinn out of Darmstadt into the Revolutionary War and the West Virginia frontier; Pfrimmer out of Alsace; Kuhns.
Wyoming and the Great Plains: Trudell at Rawlins; Siegel and Schwartzkopf at Stratton, McGrew, Scottsbluff and Morrill.

Warriors and builders

Hans George Zinn: Hessian immigrant, Revolutionary War service in the Virginia frontier militia, buried at Philippi.
Francis "Frank" Perron dit Trudell: U.S. Army, the 1862 Dakota War — fighting for the United States while his Dakota wife and children were held at Fort Snelling.
Robert Ethan Bedwell Jr.: Great-uncle. First lieutenant and B-24 Liberator pilot over Italy in the Second World War; Calipatria High valedictorian; Imperial Valley farmer.
William L. Siegel: Marine in the Second World War; then the agronomy career, the company, the radio show and the Hall of Agricultural Achievement.
Jim Davis: Army Special Forces, c. 1957–60.
The Davis settlers: James H. and Howard Davis, among the families who built the Imperial Valley; a paternal uncle who became a celebrated high-school baseball coach; Steve Davis and the hay business.
Five first-born sons: Great-grandfather, grandfather, father, Blake, and his son: five consecutive generations of first-born boys, a run he is still tracing further back.

The names

Blake: Redeemed; forgiven by grace; harmonizer; light and dark — the readings he gathers for the given name.
Siegel: In the Ashkenazi Segal tradition, an acronym of Segan Leviyyah — 'prince of the Levites,' the assistant to the High Priest; in German, 'victory'; as an occupational name, the seal-maker. His maternal line, his middle name.
Davis: 'Beloved,' 'son of David.' The patronymic runs unbroken John → James → Howard → Jim → Steve → Blake, and the Welsh Davis arms carry the same lion the Tribe of Judah does.
The count: Blake 5, Siegel 6, Davis 5 — the letter counts he maps to ה ו ה.

The Jewish question

He was raised Christian and came to Jewish practice as an adult; he keeps Shabbat and has pursued the question of Jewish ancestry on both sides of the family. This is the case as he makes it, built on what is in the record and in the scholarship, followed by what the case has to carry.

The names carry real Jewish weight, not just resemblance: Siegel is one of the classic Ashkenazi Levite surnames: in the Segal/Siegel/Chagall family of spellings it is read as an acronym of Segan Leviyyah, 'assistant to the Levites' — the name a Levite family took to mark its status — and in the United States it is disproportionately a Jewish name. Zinn is an occupational name carried by both Germans and Jews. Schwartzkopf appears in German-Jewish records as a descriptive name. Davis is the standard anglicization Jewish families took from Davidovich, Davidson and David; a Davis line of Missouri origin with no church record anywhere on it is the profile that anglicization produces. Four surnames, each in the dual-use zone, is a pattern rather than one coincidence.
The mechanism is documented history: Forced conversion and concealment are not a theory. The Rhineland massacres of 1096, the Black Death expulsions of 1349, the Iberian conversos, and the eighteenth-century German name mandates all produced families whose paper identity was Christian for generations while descent was Jewish. Modern genetics has since confirmed converso descent in populations whose records said otherwise: successful hiding leaves no proof, which is the finding of the converso studies in the American Southwest and Latin America.
The migration rhythm fits: Württemberg to the Volga in 1766; out of Russia in the decade the empire's antisemitism peaked; into the Nebraska panhandle; then west to the Imperial Valley. Families that were secure did not keep moving on that schedule.
The biblical name cluster sits on the flagged branches: Esther, David, Jacob, Moses, Louis: they land on the Schwartzkopf and Siegel lines, not scattered at random across the tree.
The strongest fact is still available: Descent through a hidden line survives in two places that autosomal averaging cannot erase: the straight male line and the straight female line. His own mtDNA is his mother's mother's mother's — Mary, Esther, Katie Gettman, and up — which is exactly the line Jewish status passes through, and roughly forty percent of Ashkenazi maternal lines belong to four founder lineages (K1a1b1a, K1a9, K2a2a, N1b2) identifiable in a single test. A Siegel male relative's Y-DNA tests the Levite claim directly: about two-thirds of Ashkenazi Levites carry the R1a-M582 lineage (Rootsi et al., 2013). His own Y-DNA tests the Davis line the same way. Three tests convert the argument into evidence in either direction.

What the case has to carry, stated once. The Volga colony censuses recorded religion and list the Schwartzkopfs as Lutheran; Catherine the Great's manifesto excluded Jews by name; the pogrom waves struck the Pale of Settlement, not Saratov; German Protestants used those biblical first names heavily; and Siegel is also a common Christian German name from Siegel, 'seal.' None of that disproves concealment — it is what concealment would look like — but it means the documents will never settle it, and the DNA will.

Where it stands. Undetermined by documents, by the argument's own logic; the three tests above are the evidence that would move it either way. He holds the practice and the identification regardless, and the name study above is his, offered as such.

The family before Abraham — the covenant as a family and not a bloodline — is Chain 9 on the Spiritual logic page; the microbiome heritage model is on the Medical page.