Mary: You have every opportunity to submit a personal sample for analysis of mitochondrial DNA, which will represent your ancestral direct female line. Granted, it's more difficult to follow the female line backwards, due to the fact that we North Americans have, with few exceptions, always been a patriarchal society. Our names are perpetuated through our fathers, and inheritance (and record-keeping) was historically more favorable to sons than to daughters. It's a fact of biology and a fact of history that our research lines have primarily been those of our male ancestors, and that Y-DNA happens to follow those male lines very closely. I paid a lot of money to submit a sample from a third cousin (once removed) whom I've never met, who represents my mother's Hall line, not my male Patrick line. Mother spent forty years looking at microfilms, library records, and courthouse archives, searching for her Hall ancestry, and was always brick-walled at our William Hall (1758-1844). It's gratifying that, even after her death, we might eventually be able to tie Old Willy Hall to the rest of his extended family through Y-DNA comparisons. There's also a chance that we'll never know those answers. Nobody should ever be criticized for unwillingness to participate in DNA project. DNA databases only represent an infinitesimal portion of genealogical data available to us, and DNA is only one tiny little tool. We must avoid the inclination to place too much emphasis on DNA research, simply because it's easy. Our day-to-day creative searches for dependable historical information should never take a second place to the stuff that's in the Y-DNA or mtDNA databases. Best regards, Jim Patrick ************************************** Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL at http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour