Monday, October 17, 2005 - Bangor Daily News
by Roxanne Moore Saucier
? ?I had such a wonderful time at last Saturday's "Roots to Success," the meeting of the Maine Genealogical Society in Fairfield. Nancy Battick, Dale Mower and the rest of the organizers did a great job giving researchers a variety of choices for workshops.? I could listen all day to Tom Roderick, a retired geneticist who worked for The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, talk about genetics and genealogy. He has been one of my favorite speakers for more than 20 years. I was so enthused after hearing him that I promptly:
? . Went to a bookstore and bought Bryan Sykes' "The Seven Daughters of Eve," which talks about the origins of people with European ancestry. I'm halfway through it and highly recommend the book.
? . Replaced my aging home computer, the better to organize my forebears.
? . Logged onto
www.jogg.info, the Web site of the
Journal of Genetic Genealogy? . Nearly ran off to become a geneticist, but fortunately remembered that I have a family and a job I love, not to mention the fact that a degree in political science is not the most direct path to a doctorate in genetics.
? ? ? Let's get back to
JOGG. The
Journal of Genetic Genealogy is a quarterly publication just beginning. T. Whit Athey is the editor, and the associate editors are Tom Roderick and Dennis Garvey.
The journal will include articles, requests from researchers looking for subjects and questions posed by genealogists.
Some of the articles are quite technical, while others contain much that is more understandable to the layperson. We know, for instance, that we get our genes from both parents, but the Y chromosome is found only in males.
And mitochondrial DNA is the DNA that comes from your mother's mother's mother's mother's line. Both men and women receive mitochondrial DNA from their mothers, but only women can pass it on to their children.
I'm currently reading from the JOGG Web site Ellen Levy-Coffman's "A Mosaic of People: The Jewish Story and a Reassessment of the DNA Evidence."? The focus of the article is the Ashkenazi Jews, but it also brings in research related to two other populations - American Indians and Scandinavian-Shetlanders. Some people in these three groups may have the same ancestors from a part of Siberia.
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here for the rest of the article.
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