mitochondrial DNA

Has anyone read The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes

I understand the difficulties in tracing DNA through the female lines but isn't anyone giving the idea some thought ?

I should think a big enough database would allow us to track down some of those elusive no-surname females in our trees.

Maybe being female gives me a bit more interest in the distaff DNA but I just don't see one as being any more important than the other in genaelogy.

Anyone else have any thoughts on this ?

Well, to be honest, for the sake of strict accuracy, the female side is probably the better one to trace as most of us can prove who our mothers are (or they can prove they gave birth to us, anyway), while there may well be a doubt hanging over many fathers. I always knew my mother's family better than my father's so I, too, have a special interest in the distaff side and am just getting to the point in my tree where some real detective work is going to be needed. I do have a little book called The Female Line by Margaret Ward, which is useful but by no means answers all the questions. (ISBN 1 85306 818 7 Pub www.countrysidebooks.co.uk)

I liked the Sykes book (#1) but although there seems to be an increasing interest in the genealogy community about DNA projects many of them seem to follow the male line through the Y-chromosome. It makes some sense because in many western societies it is the father's surname that is passed on to a couple's children. I think that's still true in spite of some trends to change this. Perhaps the decreasing prevalence of marriage (in UK at least) and children brought up in "non-standard" families will also have an effect. For example where the children live with their mother and her current "boy friend" but have several different fathers between them (a case currently in the news has about 7 fathers involved). And I expect that even in the past when everything seemed "hunky-dunky" there must have been a good number of children who were passed off as the husband's child, but weren't. Just a couple of weeks ago there was a post on a genealogy list about a (male) DNA project for my own surname (Greenhalgh). When I followed the link I got the impression it was just one of the many companies that do these tests touting for custom which must be quite lucrative for them. I didn't follow it up. I'm hoping that given time prices will go down and techniques improve. And I would be interested in the distaff side as well.

I read and loved The Seven Daughters of Eve. As to testing, there are several companies offering DNA, both Yand Mt. I have been tested for both. The problem is that it (testing) is:
a. expensive
b. not of much genealogical use--you might be lucky, but more than likely any matches you get are only going to tell you that you are related within 25 generations.

As time passes, and more people get tested, it may become possible to link families through the female line more easily. Remember, one of the problems of making a match significant is knowing it is a close match. If neither party has been able to trace the female ancestor more than two or three generations, getting a match that is even five generations back doesn't help, because you can't jump intervening generations. I am linked to hundreds of men and women around the world, but I am no closer to knowing how I am related to them today than I was before I was tested. They all have Northern European ancestry and so do I.

I am very interested in this type of testing; my father’s maternal grandmother was half American Indian. I knew her, she lived until I was eight and lived with us at times, she was defiantly of mixed heritage but I am unsure of the mix. The family was dirt poor and lived in along the Kentucky / Tennessee border. I cannot find any information on them. I have learned that there were settlements in the area that are known as tri-racial isolates, where native Americans, African Americans, and European Americans lived together and mixed freely. DNA information might provide a clue about what records to look at.

Jenny Smith (1875-1968)
Robert Hunter (? -1948)

At least if I recall correctly.

Here's an update on mitochondrial DNA research on Native American origins. It was posted on LinkedIn by the Anthropology & Linguistics group, and I immediately thought of this discussion since I had just caught up on my Library Thing reading. According to the article there are now considered to be at least 15 founding maternal North American lines.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100628170926.htm