Tuesday, February 08, 2005
By Bob Batz Jr., Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Say you get to visit the old country to explore your ancestry. You might think to take something to give your relatives. But would it be a DNA test?
Genealogy, it is a-changing.
Research is going genetic.
"Genetealogy" is what genealogist and writer Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak calls it. That's her real name, as she is by birth and by marriage Smolenyak, a surname that hails from the town of Osturna in Slovakia.
She had identified four lines of Smolenyaks and traced them back to the 1700s but couldn't find a connection among them. When DNA testing became available to the public in 2000, she used it to determine that none matched and, further, that one line was actually Vanecko.
On a subsequent trip, she and her husband furthered their quest by arriving in the village with 20 test kits and swabbing samples from men with 20 different surnames.
Click here for the rest of the article.WFN_Editor
Author