mtDNA

One of the newest trends in genealogical research is to continue charting your family tree, but to also chart only those people who share your mitochondrial DNA, that is the DNA that you inherit directly from your mother.  This DNA is not exclusive to just one person.  Every child and grandchild and so forth of a woman will share the same DNA.  This sampling shows how people in a region are related.

 There are companies now that will run your mtDNA for you and websites are just developing now where you can upload your mtDNA sequence to it, it will compare your sequence with other members of the website, and let you know if there are any relatives in their database.  This makes me wonder, though, at what point technology has gone too far? Will our genealogies be tied together not by family lines but by genetic code?