New Mexico settlements occurred in different waves, sometimes in large groups or in smaller families, thus various settlers came at different times. Some genealogies have paper trail road blocks, some are traceable all the way back to the 1598 Oñate settlement, while others can only trace to the Reconquest, Mexican or Territorial periods, and in some cases are traceable to known Native American ancestors. The New Mexico Genealogical Society’s DNA Project’s goals are to validate Y-DNA and mtDNA genealogies tracing back to their known origin in New Mexico and using DNA as a supplemental tool in the process.