Donna, I also wonder which DNA company you used. It sounds like you can learn lots more than I realized. Could be a fun project for the new year. Deena Mault

To Deena - and to all the others who have sent mail asking me about my DNA experience. Since several of you have asked questions I thought I'd answer on line. I hope not to bore you who are not interested in the subject. If so, my apologies - just hit the delete! I used Family Tree DNA. They had it on sale through December - I noticed a little bit ago that they extended the sale through Jan. 7th. I used the Family Finder kit, but for men they would do Y Chromosome testing. The reason I did the test is that I am hoping to find cousins and relatives of my elusive George Simpson who lived in Barry County at one time. We do have the promise of a direct descent of a man who says he will do the Y Chromosome testing for us. I am still hoping he will follow through because he is the only male direct descendant. So far, I haven't accomplished what I want to find out - but am having fun by firming up a lot of my files. It is great to see a line that I worked on and then to see a distant and remote cousin's file with the same family line. It makes it worthwhile. A man in Pennsylvania, from a leg of the family separated by 200 years turned up as a cousin on two of my families. I am finding out that some of my Barry County lines are matching with people who are from the same families but the connection dates back to the early days of settlement. I am seeing that most of those people are sometimes related to me in more than one way. The clusters of families who lived in geographical pockets for several generations seemed to be interrelated - and so that is helping some, I think. They take your markers and compare them with other men and women who have done DNA. For women it is called MTDNA - mitochondrial - and so all you see who has markers that match yours - they will give you the details - say third cousin or so. If you have overlapping families a 10th cousin my show up as a 3rd or say 2nd cousin. Then you compare your families to theirs for about nine generations to see what families they descend from and take it from there. Some people don't get the full benefit of it because they don't put a list of names or a Gedcom on their data sheets. I think that is a mistake - unless you are a man and doing Y Chromosome testing. Then you take all the markers and compare them by number. I can not believe the number of early day Virginia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky families that are popping up in the surnames of distant cousins - that I didn't expect to see. My Mills and Haddock families in North Carolina and Maryland are not showing up as Mills and Haddock, and are disguised in a cousin's line of names. I really am having to study the early day Maryland and Craven Co., NC names again and refresh my memory, as well as the Knox County, Kentucky names, too. I don't know why I singled just just them out. The early day Virginia ones are a hard, but the Massachusetts and Connecticut ones seem easier. That might be because I spent more years studying them and am more familiar with instant recall of families there. Nevertheless, it is a chore. So - this is not a piece of cake - it takes work to figure some of it out, but it is super fun! The finish work on my kitchen's sheet rock is lagging behind as well as my web work for the web site - all for the joy of DNA. I hope you have a good genealogy year in 2012 and that you stay well. Donna Cooper On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 3:41 PM, <deena@wildak.net> wrote: > Donna, I also wonder which DNA company you used. It sounds like you can > learn lots more than I realized.  Could be a fun project for the new year. > > Deena Mault > > The list-admin is Donna Cooper, address - (thedonnacooper@gmail.com) > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to MOBARRY-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message