Honoring Our Mothers

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Courtesy of https://clipartix.com


As Mother's Day approaches, many of us wonder how best to honor our moms, especially those of us whose mothers have passed. We want to more fully know their lives, and tell stories about them to our families. We have some great examples of such stories in past years here on the SKCGS Blog:


Recently Wikitree offered a creative way to honor our whole maternal line, the 2023 WikiTree Challenge 8. 



Registration has started to help research for mitoYDNA: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1572660/wikitree-challenge-registration-started-research-mitoydna. To participate, answer this post and say you want to be part of it. And then list your mitochondrial test here: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Special:DNATests. You will want to upload your mitochondrial test results at MitoYDNA.org, which is a wonderful free site and link that profile on Wikitree as well. There is even a Chrome browser extension to make it easy to download your results from the testing company for upload to MitoYDNA, available right there on the site. 

Finally, make sure you have a profile for each person in your maternal line starting with yourself, you mother, her mother, etc. as far back as you can go. Remember to link your mother to her sisters as well as her parents, and your grandmother to her sisters, again, as far up as you can go. This will enable Wikitree to link your mito test results to all of the properly linked profiles. Remember men, you too can test your mitochondrial DNA, and link it to your mother and your entire mito line. Besides Wikitree, you can list the mito haplogroup as a suffix to keep track of your mito line in your online tree. 

Around Mother's Day there are always DNA testing company sales, so keep an eye out for those! and become a part of the Million Mito Project. *

https://www.familytreedna.com/mtdna-million-mito-project

* For more about the project, see Million Mito Project Team – Introduction and Progress Update by Roberta Estes.


Valorie Zimmerman



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