What the project hopes to do is document the earliest (known) females who settled in the mountains, and (through mtDNA testing) identify their early origins in Europe (or elsewhere). Males can participate too--each male carries in his DNA a carbon copy of his mother's mtDNA. I have great hopes that we will also be able to answer some of the age-old questions about where the other blood in the mountain families may have come from. It will also help us understand the early origins of our female ancestors--what percentage of our mountain ancestors came from Britain, or Ireland or the European Continent or Elsewhere.