mtDNA of The Middle Appalachians- Background

Background

mtDNA of The Middle Appalachians has been set-up to identify and track the maternal (female) ancestry of the people who settled the middle Appalachian mountains. The criteria for joining this project is that you must have a paper trail for at least one of your direct maternal ancestors that places them within the geographic area of the Appalachian Mountains. The project will be a way for women (and men, who carry the mtDNA of their mothers) who descend from the early families that populated the Appalachians to participate in a worthy and historic Project that will give historians and family history buffs new insite on the female ancestry of the early settlers in the Appalachians.

Please write to me if you are interested and include a record of your direct maternal ancestry (as far back as you have records for). Please identify which of your direct maternal ancestors lived in the Appalachian region.[remember, your mtDNA will be the same as your mother's, whose mtDNA is the same as her mother's etc. etc. all the way back]. We already have some very interesting test results for mtDNA that have come back. One participant is showing evidence of an early Irish maternal origin; another may be showing a Native American female origin, and one test result has cast doubt on a 200 year family story that indicated the female ancestry was Native American-the mtDNA test results point to European origins.

Come and join us in this project--help us to re-write history and to discover our deep ancestral origins.