Into a rabbit hole, that is. I have been getting a slog of articles on DNA – mitochondrial DNA to be specific. These are being written by a number of my most respected authors – Roberta Estes (#RobertaEstes #DNAeXplained ), Katy Rowe-Schurwanz (#KatyRoweSchurwanz ), and Diahan Southard (#DiahanSouthard #YourDNAGuide ).

For the most part these articles all centered around the expanded aide offered by FamilyTreeDNA (familytreedna.com) on the mtDNA tests. AND, there is a recent expansion of the Haplotree which expanded my Haplogroup, T2f8a into a sub-clade T2f8a1 (still beta). Big whoop, right? Well, not really.

This analysis took T2f8a from having a potential Haplogroup match that does not meet up until 3550 BCE to T2f8a1 with a stake in the ground at 200 CE — that is a jump of 3370 years earlier! In addition, the new classification also assigned Haplotypes – a smaller classification that signifies a full match, no mutations, to a single haplogroup test result. These appear in the mapping of my matches. Unfortunately, Mom was right, I am unique with Haplotype F1341220. But now when I find a haplotype match, I can have a better clue of how far back I need to look to find that elusive MRCA.

Why am I devoting time to this? My great-great-grandmother, Phebe Curry (1802-1864) is one of my Brick Walls. She is also my furthest back known source of my mtDNA – direct mother to daughter line through the generations to Mom to me. I have tried to track down all of Phebe’s descendants that could possibly also carry the same mtDNA (wiping out all of the males and their descendants is helping to limit the scope).

There is so much information to absorb and try to figure out how to make use of it all. I have to admit doing this would have been a lot easier at 45, maybe 55, but at 75 it is a slow process.

I have started taking Diahan Southard’s class on mtDNA for Genealogists #yourdnaguide . So far, it is really helping fit the pieces together, but I am taking it slow and checking and double checking my understanding and relating it to my mtDNA results on FamilyTreeDNA(that being 75 thing). I just finished Lesson 1 (over a month, Diahan sent a congrats on finishing Lesson 1, now on to #2, which was a whole lot nicer than “so you finished it, what is taking so long?” that I deserved.