Little is known about the actual origin of the German settlers that came to Transylvania when the Hungarian king Géza II. called them in ~1143 AD. It is orally communicated that the first settlers came from Luxembourg, Alsace-Lorraine and the dioceses Köln, Trier and Lüttich. However in later periods after the "Golden Free-Letter" (Goldener Freibrief) 1224 AD of king Andreas II more German settlers may have followed, possibly from different regions of today's Germany. Also it would be interesting to learn how much influence the Banater Schwaben (another German speaking minority in a closeby, partially overlapping region who arrived in the 18th century after the Turkish wars) had in Transylvania and to which degree both populations mixed with each other and with the Romanian population. This project tries to verify with modern molecular genetic tools if the genealogical records match up with the Y chromosome / mtDNA haplotype and haplogroup distributions. Our goal is to find molecular genetic markers that link the Siebenbuerger Y/mtDNA lines with related descendants who didn't leave the German country of origin. Can we find surname and Y-DNA links in between them or did the Transylvanian emigration predate the patronymic naming system?