The Genographic Project

My mom has been doing our family genealogy for many years now, and over the years I've become more interested in finding out where we came from, as well. Maybe not as gung-ho as she is, but... I think finding the links are like winning a game. When you finally find the generation prior to the one you know, or finally track down an ancestor or family member you've been looking everywhere for, it's like a victory. We found them! We solved a piece in the puzzle! Now it's time to move on to the next.

When I saw Dr. Spencer Wells on The Colbert Report a few years ago talking about the genographic project and finding migration patterns, I thought it was interesting. I couldn't believe that from just a few cells from your cheek, you could find out where your ancestors lived thousands of years ago, and their migration paths. However, even though I thought it was absolutely amazing and incredible, it wasn't until a few weeks ago that I finally decided I want to know where my people came from.

I visited The Genographic Project's website, which is part of National Geographic, and read about the project. I was hooked -- I decided to break down and buy a testing kit immediately. Reading about the test, though, I found out that, as a female, I can only trace my mother's side of my DNA. I asked my father if he would be willing to get tested so I could find out about his side of the family and surprisingly, he agreed.

Our kits arrived about a week later, and today we swabbed and scraped, then the next step is to send them off and wait for the results. Until then, I'm going to fret about whether we did them correctly. Did I scrape enough? Did I make sure not to contaminate the swab, or bump it too much when I put it in the vial afterward? Any chance the vials will break in transit? Or my father's favorite -- what if we find out I'm not his child? (Which, by the way, can't happen. This isn't the type you think of when you think of DNA tests. This won't tell me if he's really my father, or if we have any genetic diseases. It looks at genetic markers in the DNA, which "allow geneticists...to trace our common evolutionary timeline back through the ages.")

More to come later.

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The Genographic Project