Madeline Albright learned late in life about her Jewish family roots. It came as quite a surprise because her family hid it very well.

Kerry's story is pretty interesting. Here's a link to a Canadian Polish-Jewish site that has posted the story. Here's a snippit:

He said he learned from a relative about 15 years ago that his grandmother, born as Ida Lowe, was Jewish, a fact, he said, that had intrigued him and that he had shared with dozens of people.

But he said he had no knowledge about his grandfather's origin, other than the vague idea that he was from Austria. He said he had long tried to learn more, at one point stopping in Vienna and trying to reach Kerrys listed in the phone book, in a fruitless effort to trace his roots.

Kerry's genealogy was traced through a variety of means: immigration records from Ellis Island, naturalization records on file in Illinois, death and probate records in Massachusetts, and a birth registry from the former Austrian empire.

The immigration records showed that Frederick Kerry arrived in the United States in 1905, and the naturalization records showed that he was born in the town formerly known as Bennisch, in the Austrian empire, which today is Horni Benesov in the Czech Republic.

Felix Gundacker, director of the Institute for Historical Family Research in Vienna, was hired by the Globe to examine the Austrian records, which he translated from the original German. He found that birth records for Bennisch include a notation for a person named Fritz Kohn.

The birth record says: ''In the year 1873, on May 10th, was born Fritz Kohn, a legal son of Benedikt Kohn, master brewer in Bennisch, House 224, and his wife, Mathilde, daughter of Jakob Frankel, royal dealer in Oberlogau in Prussia.'' The record has a notation that Fritz Kohn changed his name to Frederick Kerry on March 17, 1902. That record does not mention a baptism. But the family says Frederick Kerry was a Catholic, and he is buried at a Catholic cemetery in Brookline.

Most immigrants came for economic reasons in the days of Ellis Island, as they do today. But quite a substantial number were fleeing persecution. Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted takes a lucid look at the various factors that forced families off of the land. Primogeniture was a factor, according to him. Dividing the pie too many times doesn't leave enough for anyone, but giving the land to the eldest son often means all of the other siblings must move on.

SRS