This mtDNA Project is, I believe, long overdue. Titled mtDNA of The Middle Appalachians the project will attempt to identify and track the maternal(female) ancestry of the people who settled the middle Appalachian mountains. If there is good amount of participation, the project will be a way for women 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. 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 Continant or Elsewhere. Please write to me if you are interested, and meet the criteria of having at least one of your direct maternal ancestors who is proven to have lived in the Middle Appalachian Mountains geographic area. [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 matrilineal origin; another may be showing a Native American female origin, and one test result has disproved a 200 year family story that indicated the female ancestry was Native American-the mtDNA test proves otherwise. Women with at least one proven direct maternal line (from the 18th or 19th century) who resided in the Middle Appalachians are invited to join us in this project; men whose direct maternal ancestry includes at least one of their direct maternal ancestors who was a resident of the Middle Appalachians are welcome too--help us to re-write history and to discover our deep ancestral origins.