Saturday, September 29, 2012

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun ~ Your Matrilineal Line

Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge is as follows:

1) List your matrilineal line - your mother, her mother, etc. back to the first identifiable mother. Note: this line is how your mitochondrial DNA was passed to you!

2) Tell us if you have had your mitochondrial DNA tested, and if so, which Haplogroup you are in.

3) Post your responses on your own blog post, in Comments to this blog post, or in a Status line on Facebook or in your Stream at Google Plus.

4)  If you have done this before, please do your father's matrilineal line, or your grandfather's matrilineal line, or your spouse's matrilineal line.

5)  Does this list spur you to find distant cousins that might share one of your matrilineal lines?


My husband's matrilineal line is as follows:

a) his mother, still living
b) Rose Levitt (1902, NJ - 1995, NJ) married Morris Goldstein
c) Golda Segal (about 1869, Russia - 1952, PA) married Max Levitt
d) unknown (d. before the 1891 immigration of her husband and children) married Simche Siegel

My husband has not had his mitochondrial DNA tested. It might be interesting to confirm that his mother's maternal line originated in what is now known as Ukraine. Simche and his children immigrated from Shytomir, Russia (now Ukraine) in December 1891.

Note that both men and women receive mitochondrial DNA from their mothers; only women pass it along to their children. A relatively concise summary of genetic genealogy (a huge and complex topic) can be found at The Genetic Genealogist blog.

4 comments:

  1. Interesting. Where do you go to had your mitochondrial DNA tested?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The two most prominent testing companies seem to be FamilyTreeDNA and 23andMe. At this time, I don't have any particular experience with either of them.

      Thanks for reading and commenting.

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  2. I just know one of these days we're going to link our Goldstein lines together!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Debi - Not sure about that - according to family lore, this Morris Goldstein changed his surname from Yancu to Goldstein in Romania before immigrating to NYC in 1914. It's always fun to speculate though...

      Thanks for reading and commenting.

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