Over the last 400 years, many families have immigrated from Europe, Africa, and Asia to settle in the Americas. Many of these families names were “anglicized” to make pronunciation and spelling easier for the many colonial census takers and government record keepers. After many generations, many of these descendants have lost contact with their ancestors names, their history and their country of origin. The resurgence in the science of genealogy has exploded with the use of the home computers, genealogy software, and millions of pages of archived records accessible on the internet.

For many years, amateur genealogists have been searching for paper records, letters, and family stories to document their earliest ancestors. However, many genealogists run into brick-walls when the trail of paper records runs out or when they reach the earliest date when no records were kept along the wilderness frontier.

Each human has 23 pairs of chromosomes, a pair from our father’s sperm and a collateral pair from our mother’s egg that combine in each cells nucleus to develop into a baby. One pair of chromosomes, the X from the mother and Y from the father, determine the sex of a child. If the baby has an X and Y chromosome it will become a male, and if the child has two XX chromosomes a female. Geneticists have now decoded the whole human genome of 46 chromosomes and have found that there are parts of the Y chromosome that remain unchanged, unmutated, or non-recombinant (NRY) for many tens of generations. This male NRY DNA is passed from father to son to grandson, to each great grandson in each ensuing generation. Thus the NRY of the seventh great grandson is essentially identical to the same NRY of the original American male settler. This NRY part of the Y chromosome can be chemically tested at pre-determined locations, or “loci”, to count the number of repetitions of the 4 base pairs (cytosine, guanine, adenine, thymine) or allele markers. Each male has a distinctive number set of repetitive NRY markers that can distinguish them from all other males from other non-related families. These markers also can be used to link each male grandson directly back to his immigrant great-grandfather that lived hundreds of years ago.

Also in every body cell, there are small energy-producing nodules called mitochondria that we inherit from our mothers. Each of these mitochondria have a distinctive set of non-recombinant DNA (mtDNA) that is inherited from our earliest known great grandmother. Geneticists has determined through mtDNA chemical analysis that the earliest modern human female, or Eve, originated about 200,000 years ago in Africa and all living humans have descended from her. Today, we carry the same mtDNA with minor variations or mutations as she did. The minor mutations in this maternal mtDNA markers have even been used to define seven daughters of this Eve.