Janey wrote: > There is a tradition of American Indian ancestry in both my mother > and my father's families, but I have yet to find any proof of such > ancestry. Can DNA testing reveal that there is American Indian > Ancestry in families? That depends on when and who. If there is an unbroken mother-to- daughter line from an Indian to you, then your mitochondrial DNA should belong to one of the haplogroups common among Indians. If there are any males in that line of descent, though, your mtDNA would come from elsewhere and would not reveal the Indian heritage. Similarly, if there is an unbroken father-to-son line to your father, then his Y DNA should be characteristic. If neither of these is true, then there is a third possibility -- if a grandparent, or possibly even a great grandparent, of the testee was a full-blooded Indian, there should be discernable traces in the DNA, and there is a test for that now available (but the marketing hype for that test is egregious, even by the standards of DNA marketing hype). John Chandler "John F. Chandler" <JCHBN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU>