Sephardic Bnei Anusim forebear/s who was/were forced to convert from Judaism to Catholicism. In regards to the second issue, in Rabbinic Judaism, a person's Jewish status is determined in one of two ways: Thus, natural-born Jewish status of a child (male or female) comes from its mother, via its maternal grandmother, via its maternal great-grandmother, and so on. As a consequence of the number of generations that have passed since the forced conversion of the Anusim ancestors of the Sephardic Bnei Anusim, the likelihood of a broken direct maternal Jewish lineage in that time (or the difficulty in producing documentary evidence proving otherwise)
Sephardic Bnei Anusim the person is a Sephardic Ben/Bat Anusim or a newly reverted Neo-Western Sephardic Jew). Although it is true that a few surnames among those specifically mentioned above became popularly adopted by New Christians (including, most notably the surname Pérez, because of its similarity to the Hebrew surname Peretz), such popularly adopted surnames by New Christians remain Old Christian surnames in origin, and carrying these surnames does not by itself indicate Jewish ancestry. This phenomenon is much the same as is the situation with surnames which are typically considered to be Ashkenazi "Jewish" surnames. Most "Jewish" surnames among Ashkenazi Jews are