At 11:21 PM 4/9/2006, NBettyboop30@aol.com wrote: >Help > Daughter of a male Perkins from Virginia/West Virginia Greenbrier County, if >I give my DNA it will be my mothers side that shows up..Am I getting this >right. >I also have Perkins marring Perkins my great grandparents Perkins were first >cousins.. >For me I'll have my mom grandmother her mother and on and on.. > >Confused Perkins Girl Hi: OK, let's keep this reasonably simple so our list admin doesn't lose patience with us. Each child gets two kinds of DNA. One comes only from the mother. That is mitochondrial DNA, abbreviated mtDNA. The other kind of DNA is in the chromosomes. Each child gets half of its chromosomes from each parent, one of each kind from each parent forming pairs. The chromosomes in the pair which determines sex can be X or Y. If a child has one of each, it is a male; if it has two X, it is a female. Currently, the most attention in DNA genealogy is paid to the chromosomal DNA found in the Y chromosome. This is often abbreviated yDNA. Male children always get the Y chromosome from their fathers, and female children do not have one. The effect of all this is as follows: 1. yDNA is used to trace male-line descent, *only*. No female has a Y chromosome, and so the test is never done on females. Any female in a line breaks the yDNA chain. 2. mtDNA is used to trace female-line descent. It is *almost* the exact mirror image of yDNA, with the exception that it can be used to trace a male's female ancestry (i.e., the most recent person in the line can be male; from there back, females only). In the culture in which the PERKINS surname arose, the name is passed from father to children and given up by daughters at marriage. There is therefore a great deal of interest among surname-oriented genealogists in the yDNA tests and little interest in the mtDNA. However, there is no other reason why mtDNA should not get equal billing. In fact, female-only lines are more reliably accurate due to the nature of biology and human behavior; it is just that the documentation, until recently, has been much worse -- and there is that surname thing. We can expect a LOT of developments in this field in the very near future. Darrell Darrell A. Martin darrellm@sprynet.com a native Vermonter currently in exile in Illinois http://www.darrell-martin.net/genealogy/